Around this time, as well as such formal developments, I was able to bring forward another important measure, which gave me great delight then and continues to do so now when I hear mention of it — the system of the Home–School Liaison Teacher. This marks in my mind a wonderful milestone in my odyssey within the Department of Education and indeed Irish public life.
It all started when a certain Concepta Connaghty came to see me out of the blue in Marlborough Street one day. (This lady has since passed away.) This was a time when all the huge difficulties within the large inner and outer city primary schools were beginning to emerge, due to growing numbers of one-parent families and those living on the breadline. A teacher based in Tallaght, Ms Connaghty had been working with the children in such schools for some time and, as she told me, she saw a great need in these environments for a ‘developmental’ type of teacher — someone who would be attached to a school but not in a teaching capacity. He or she would be there to liaise between the school and the parent or parents, in situations where a child was not making a fist of school or indeed in some cases not turning up for lessons at all. In other words, to focus on children who might later go on to fail in the system and of whom a high proportion were at risk of ending up as drop-outs and misfits, perhaps joining gangs and turning to criminal activity. I thought the idea was an excellent one. I gave it all some further consideration and I then spoke to Tom Gillen, the then Assistant Secretary in charge of Primary Education. Tom agreed that it would be a very worthwhile initiative to explore, and we prepared a Memorandum for Government.
I must digress here slightly to explain that, if a member of Cabinet has a developmental idea or proposal which he or she wants to bring to Cabinet for consideration, a Memorandum must be prepared and then circulated to each serving Cabinet Member, who will give their own feedback on it at the next Cabinet meeting. Particularly in the straitened circumstances of the late 1980s, the proposing Minister would always await these responses with trepidation, especially with regard to the presiding Minister for Finance and his Department. They were always deemed to be the most dangerous ones because they were always against everything! Of course I fully understood that then and I fully understand it now: the job of the Department of Finance is to try to keep the country on an even financial keel, to keep the spending in the various Ministries under control and to put forward their own stringent views. It was ever thus and it will always be thus.
At that time we were in a period in which Memorandums in general were being massively cut back on and so, once I had circulated my proposal to all of my colleagues, I sallied off to Cabinet, armed with my file and all my background information, little expecting that I would find any echoes of approval. Sure enough, when my turn came to bring up the issue, the Taoiseach turned to me and said, ‘What is this Memorandum about, Mary? Is it more teachers?’
Ray MacSharry saw his opening, and pounced. ‘Yes Taoiseach,’ he chimed, ‘more teachers and these ones won’t even teach!’
There was a kind of audible gasp around the table at my sheer effrontery, but that little bold streak in me kept going in spite of it all. I reddened up at all the attention, but I looked at the Taoiseach and caught his eye.
‘Let Mary explain, Ray,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear her idea.’
So I ploughed on and explained as best I could: that children in disadvantaged areas would benefit greatly, that this could help to combat some of the difficulties in our troubled urban districts, and so on. Charlie listened carefully, nodded his head once or twice and he then said to me directly, ‘Could this be done in a pilot way? Could you introduce these home — whatever you call them — liaison people, let’s say, in two urban and rural areas? And if it works, build from there?’
‘Yes, yes!’ I replied, delighted. Once more, I had followed my ‘seize the day’ strategy and it had worked. So I went back triumphantly to my Department, and we piloted the scheme in South Dublin, where Concepta Connaghty worked, and in a large rural school too, and ten others besides. We started with these twelve schools, and the initiative grew from there and soon became mainstream.
It almost goes without saying that the INTO were fully in favour. After all, it meant more teachers, albeit not of the teaching kind, but it also meant that their care for disadvantaged pupils would be improved. To give that particular union their due, this was always their aim: to do their very best for the pupils. Of course, they wanted to do their utmost for their trade union members as well, but often, as in this instance, the two aims could overlap and if so, it was always a happy outcome.
After seeing through two budgets, Ray MacSharry was appointed to the post of European Commissioner in Brussels, a job he was happy to accept, while Albert Reynolds would become Minister for Finance.
I would always regard another of my key achievements of my time in Education as the creation of two new universities in Limerick and Dublin City — the first universities to have been set up in Ireland since we became an independent country. Instituting via legislation the University of Limerick and Dublin City University was something of which I was particularly proud, as it was such a positive accomplishment in those very difficult times.
For the four years I had been Shadow Spokesperson for Education opposite Gemma Hussey as Minister for Education, Garret FitzGerald had been pushing forward the idea of conferring full university status on the two National Institutes of Limerick and Glasnevin. When I had first come into office in March 1987, I too had been lobbied — at times mercilessly — by the heads of these two establishments, Dr Ed Walsh in Limerick and Dr Danny O’Hare in Dublin. Initially, the creation of universities did not loom high on my horizon, because there were all those huge, horrendous cuts to be made everywhere, but when 1987 and 1988 came and the financial pressure began to ease slightly, I was keen to pick up the matter again. I went to discuss it with Charlie Haughey, and he too was very much in agreement with the idea, advising me to take the next steps and discuss it with a legal person. We duly did this, after which my Department officials put together a proposal which I was able to bring to Cabinet. Once I had secured general approval there, I went away again to start the task of preparing the legislation, assisted very ably as ever by my Departmental staff.
At the end of May 1989 — just before the one-party Fianna Fáil government fell, in fact — came the day I was to pilot the legislation (the University of Limerick Bill and Dublin City University Bill) through Dáil Éireann. Lo and behold — who was its main adversary that day, but Garret FitzGerald! I was dumbfounded, as he had been so pushy and determined that this should progress when they were in government. Otherwise, our lobbying with the Labour and Fine Gael deputies had worked a treat, and so Garret was the only really adversarial voice.
It was an interesting incident, because Garret was still employed by UCD on a retainer basis as a professor, and he genuinely would have had a strong belief in universities and in the lineage of them and the philosophical merits of their existence. This I fully subscribed to myself, having studied Newman and his ideas of what a university should be. So I was knocked sideways by Garret’s onslaught on me that day in the Dáil, when it was clear that he was quite determined to hold sway. In the end, however, his objections petered out — it did not even come to a vote. But to me, the incident showed a side to Garret FitzGerald which was at odds with the kindly, ‘wise grandfather’ image one had of him. As others have commented in recent years, there is no doubt that he could drive a hard bargain and fight very strongly for something he wanted. I was just surprised that he chose to take issue so strongly with what I was proposing on that particular occasion. That said, in many ways, I admired Garret. I had a high regard for his long life of political endeavour — in particular, his work on the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the way he bravely stuck it out in spite of Margaret Thatcher’s infamous ‘Out, out, out!’ incantations. I well remember hearing those and my feelings of astonishment at the time that he was able to pretend she hadn’t said such things, or that
he didn’t understand her meaning in any case. I greatly respected how he was able to still plough on, so that some kind of resolution could be reached in the form of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which of course laid the foundation for much that followed.
Coming back to the universities, however. I was delighted that the two men in question — Ed Walsh and Danny O’Hare — quickly proved to be very able Presidents of their exciting new establishments. As time goes on, I feel their work will be recognised even more fully. In later years, I was always very interested to meet graduates from UL and DCU , and to see how well these two modern universities adapted to the closing years of the twentieth century and the beginning of a new millennium. In tandem with the new universities, we managed to merge Thomond College with Limerick University and St Pat’s in Drumcondra as the educational training arm of Dublin City University.
In the General Election of June 1989, Fianna Fáil lost seats, and for the first time we broke the mantra of a one-party government and went into coalition with Des O’Malley and the Progressive Democrats. All the manoeuvring that went on at that time has been well depicted by Albert Reynolds and Bertie Ahern in their books. I remember being at the Cabinet meeting when the acting Taoiseach, Charlie Haughey, went around the table, asking us one by one whether we would agree with the proposal to go in with the Progressive Democrats and if we thought they should have one or two Cabinet positions — they were pressing for two, naturally. In the end, Des O’Malley and Bobby Molloy would take up Cabinet roles. Everyone was amazed that Charlie Haughey would engage politically with what might have been perceived as the enemy, but engage he did and with gusto. For Charlie, in politics, as in many other areas of life, pragmatism held sway and he quite rightly deduced that the 1989 electorate would not be in favour of an immediate further General Election — which would have been the inevitable outcome if he did not form a government this time around.
So, away we all sailed on the good ship Coalition. I don’t mean to sound trite here, but for us in Fianna Fáil, the concept of a one-party government had been a key principle for so long. Increasingly now in the twenty-first century, it seems like such an archaic expectation. Already then, in the late 80s and early 90s, a one-party government had ceased to be the norm in many of the other developed European countries, where coalitions of two, three and four parties were in government.
Be that as it may, this new scenario in June 1989 occasioned much angst among Fianna Fáil supporters, angst which was stoked up privately by Albert Reynolds and Pádraig Flynn, who never got over their love of one-party government, or their distaste for coalition. For his pains, Pádraig Flynn as Minister for the Environment was handed a Minister of State by the name of Mary Harney, who was charged with the special task of protection of the environment. There were many in-house tales of how he treated her and how he spoke about her, but Mary was a dogged performer who kept to her brief and brought forward many worthwhile initiatives, including helping to rid Dublin of smog. Publicly, however, Pádraig Flynn treated her courteously and never engaged in any spats.
As for me, fortunately I retained my role as Minister for Education and was assigned an excellent Minister of State in Fianna Fáil’s Frank Fahy, who had already been with me for a while before the election. He was in charge of Sport and Youth Affairs and, I feel, has never been given the full acclaim he deserves for the wonderful work he did in both of those sub-portfolios. He was a great colleague and one with whom I very much enjoyed working.
Despite the setback of the 1989 election, economic growth was slowly but surely returning. I embarked on my renewed brief with great gusto, always looking out for what I could do positively, rather than focusing overly on the negative.
I became very interested in the fledgling Educate Together movement, which favoured the setting up of multidenominational schools. The first Educate Together school had been set up in 1978, under the aegis of the then Minister for Education, John Wilson: a hugely influential, learned and witty man. Against much opposition — most of it within his own Department — he facilitated and funded the setting up of the first such school in Dalkey. But the initiative had not been taken much further after that, sadly. My predecessor Gemma Hussey had been in favour of the project also, but due to financial constraints and other pressing issues during her tenure, the matter had been dropped until I decided to take up the ball and run with it.
One of my first objectives was to try to figure out the rationale behind the prevailing hostility within the Department of Education to the rise and spread of multidenominational schools. After all, how could anybody in their right mind be against such a worthy concept, that children of all faiths and none should come together in the primary school their parents wished them to attend, that they should learn to live together, and that their young minds would be opened to influences from all sides, never being required to fix on any particular one — at least, not until they were sufficiently mature to choose for themselves which, if any, to adopt?
I had my own suspicions about why and where resistance to the concept of multidenominational education subsisted. When I talked to various officials in the system, I soon found that my suspicions were not too wide of the mark. The main objector was the established Church, both the Catholic Church — which had of course an almost complete hold on the running of primary schools around the country — and likewise the Church of Ireland. To give those representing the churches their due, there was initially at least no outward animosity towards my ideas, but I knew it was fermenting under the surface. This was the time of Archbishop Connell — later to be Cardinal Connell — and his Education Expert, Father Dan, who was operating out of an office at St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Marlborough Street, just opposite the Department of Education. Putting the objections of the Church aside, it seemed that there were very few practical obstacles in the way of the implementation of such a worthy project. The initial Educate Together proposals which came in from the various groups were asking for very little in the way of start-up funding; they already had Boards of Management in place, and only wanted to secure the appropriate permission to forge ahead with their ideas.
There were in the Department of Education numerous starter applications on file for primary schools to set up under the Educate Together banner. These were mostly in the Dublin and greater Dublin area; there were also embryonic ones around the country. I made my mind up very swiftly that I would go full steam ahead in fostering and encouraging this flowering of multidenominational education. And so, one by one, I started to give permission for such schemes to be progressed: in Bray and Ranelagh and then Swords, Cork, Sligo, Kilkenny, North Bay Dublin, Limerick and Rathfarnham. Great excitement was generated by the setting up of these experimental schools, and the idea began to grow in popularity. The early pioneering educationalists in the movement would call a public meeting in an area to set out the spirit and ethos of their vision: parents would be invited to come and join in and listen. It became in many ways a stream which led to a deluge, and I moved onwards with the idea all the time.
On a most interesting and more recent note, in the autumn of 2010 Educate Together wrote to me with an invitation to join their National Board of Education. At that time, I had to very reluctantly turn down the opportunity, telling them that whilst I was in full public life, it would be difficult for me to manage the meetings and other commitments the role would involve. As things worked out, however, I lost my seat the following year and when a renewed invitation came in, I accepted with great alacrity. Life is funny, and I am glad that Ruairi Quinn is in charge now of the Department of Education: he will move things along in this area. Our new aim now in Educate Together is to bring the initiative into the secondary sector. After all, it is a natural progression that the parents of children brought up in their primary years in this free, open way with regard to religion and background should wish to keep them on that path of constant renewal and enlightenment. To this day, I regard my championing of Educate Together as one of the
highlights of my time within the Department of Education.
All the while throughout my tenure as Minister, I relentlessly kept up a continuing series of meetings with all of the educational interest groups. I was able to give small grants to the National Parents’ Council (NPC) at primary level and at secondary level. I also nurtured my strong links with trade union members. I liked to keep up such contacts, off the record. I strongly felt that in this way, I would be in a better position to find out exactly what was happening within the Department and what was emanating from the Department, as distinct from merely relying on the arid, dry files which came to me. As such, I was able to enjoy and benefit from a lively and candid exchange with teachers and other interest groups, and I am sure that our work in the Department was all the more effective because of it. Fortunately for me, Margaret Walsh continued to be my Advisor, my friend and my stalwart companion through all of these efforts, trials, vicissitudes and triumphs.
I believe that it is a given that primary education should be the focus of much of the determination, deliberation and decision-making of any Minister for Education, no matter what his or her financial straitjacket is. After all, primary school is where a child starts learning and first finding their feet in an environment outside the home, and a good experience at this stage will have a lasting impact throughout all of that child’s formative years. The most basic requirement is that this environment should be safe and fit for purpose. Yet, because of the dire financial circumstances we found ourselves in in the late 1980s, the Department’s capital funding for school buildings was severely curtailed. Huge chunks were chopped off budgets, meaning that plans for improvements and new buildings which had been previously envisaged could not be put into effect as hoped. However, that didn’t stop an increasing number of pupils piling into schools with poorly equipped classrooms and prefabs. The plain fact was that I had very little money, there were huge numbers going into the schools and there was a great need for many improvements of school facilities, necessarily of an expensive nature. I began to despair as to whether there was any way out of this financial dilemma concerning our primary schools.
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