Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate Senator Conway on putting together this motion. Those of us on the Opposition benches are at a terrible disadvantage whenever Senator Conway says anything, promotes anything or drafts a motion because it is very difficult to debate with somebody with whom one tends to agree most of the time on the stances he takes, the opinions he has and the effort he makes. I commend him again on the effort he put into the motion. I also welcome the Minister to the House.

When the debate on history in the junior certificate kicked off a number of years ago, it was like alternative facts, as one-liners became instant conversations about downgrading history and that history would no longer be compulsory. As has been said by speakers across the House, history has never been officially compulsory. It is compulsory in approximately 50% of schools. I will throw out some statistics which might be of interest to people taking part in this debate. These were given to the education committee when the topic came up a number of years ago. An official from the Department gave the following statistics. Approximately 54,000 students per year study junior certificate history and junior certificate geography, but when it comes to the leaving certificate approximately 23,000 continue to study leaving certificate geography but 13,002 study leaving certificate history. Approximately 20% of those who study junior certificate history continued to study leaving certificate history. We can plough on with doing things as we have always done them and pretend everything is wonderful, or we can try to change them. Clearly, if one feels passionately about history and its importance and not repeating the mistakes of history, we should aspire to having more students taking history to leaving certificate level. From these basic statistics on the number of students taking on the subject at leaving certificate level we have a major problem. Why are students being turned off this subject? Why does it not inspire them? Why are other subjects considered to be more important? This is something that deserves imagination and investigation.

There must be autonomy for schools in various parts of the country to teach history in various ways. I taught in a primary school the history of housing policy, tuberculosis, and the history of the heroin epidemic, which were much more relevant than they would be in another part of the country. In another part of the country, the history of the islands, the Gaeltacht or farming policy might be much more relevant than other topics from an urban perspective. The junior certificate has an opportunity to allow students investigate something relevant to them and which they may not have not an opportunity to investigate previously, and make it obvious how history impacts on their day to day lives and how they can learn when debating and discussing contemporaneous issues that there is always an historical context to everything.

I am fascinated about what Senator Feighan said about Gallipoli. As he quite rightly said, Gallipoli should be a term, battle, word and place that resonates with every Irish child and every Irish man or woman because 4,000 Irish men died in Gallipoli 100 years ago. One of them was my great granduncle. We did not know about it as children growing up. We were much more in tune with the republican side.

As has been said, history can be divisive. There are more than two sides to any historical discussion and generally the discussions have a shade of ten or 12 opinions. There are stories in Irish history which go untold. We have a very linear historical background in the country, whereby one event happens and then another and then another. Things have happened in this city, and I have mentioned the heroin epidemic of the late 1970s, which are much more relevant to children today than the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland of the late 1960s. I am not saying these should be competing themes or discussions in the classroom, but children need to be aware of both. We should also not have divides so people from a part of the country with no knowledge of the background of housing policy, drug policy or how tuberculosis was such a killer in the city in the 1940s might be exposed to it and discover an interest in it, so when it comes to debating national policy perspectives and priorities they come to it with a much wider view. I am an urban-based politician and if I had grown up having learned in school a greater knowledge of rural sensitivities, I might have a better chance of having a rounded opinion.

We are debating education and when we try to change how something has always happened in education, people get upset. We cannot touch Irish language policy without being called something akin to Cromwell. If we suggest that we should change the way Irish is taught or imposed on children who do not have any interest in it, we receive quite a number of cranky e-mails from people throughout the country. If we attempt to change any subject close to people's hearts, such as history, accusations will be thrown around the place as to one's motivations. I will say again, and it is something to which the Minister should refer in his closing remarks, if only 20% of students at leaving certificate level study a subject which the vast majority of pupils study at junior certificate level, clearly we are not doing the job we should be doing. It is not inspiring young people as it should inspire them. Perhaps it is not as relevant to them as it should be. If we allow this autonomy for schools to focus part of their time on issues particularly relevant to their geographical areas, as well as opening the minds of the students to other points of view and other traditions from other parts of the country, we will have more rounded students and people with opinions based on fact and with sensitivity regarding where people come from.