A Ministry In Need Of a Little Education

By AM Friday, December 5, 2008

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Watching the Scannal programme as I write, staring at me from the screen is an old newspaper headline ‘The scandal of our schools’ with the by-line of Pat Holmes. As I am not paying any great attention, merely making use of the opportunity it provides to kick-start an article, I don’t know the date of the piece. But it sure helps to create a feel that the way education is promoted in Ireland has long been scandalous and not just a recent phenomenon foist upon the sector nationwide by Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail.

If we didn’t know them any better we might be gasping in bewilderment at Sinn Fein kicking up a fuss over the current state of the education system in the Republic. Senator Pearse Doherty and MEP Mary Lou McDonald have been at the forefront of the party’s charge against Fianna Fail and the Greens who between them have hacked away at the intellectual future of the Republic in Budget 2009.

In warning the government parties that there would be an electoral price to pay for their refusal to reduce classroom sizes, Senator Pearse Doherty predicted: ‘It is my view that Fianna Fáil and the Green Party will be punished for their savage attack on pupils, teachers, parents and the entire education sector at future polls.’

Sinn Fein criticising any party for breaking promises is a bit rich, but that failed to dissuade MEP Mary Lou McDonald from hitting the chutzpah bull’s-eye with her comment that:

In advance of Budget 2009 Fianna Fáil and the Green Party promised to protect the vulnerable and frontline health and education services. But they have in fact delivered is one of the most inequitable budgets in recent memory.

Absolutely true but how easily does any of it actually sit with party colleague Catriona Ruane serving as British micro minister for education in the North with a most undistinguished record on the very things her southern colleagues complain about? Pearse Doherty may indeed make calls for ‘the public to continue in their support for the teachers, the unions and the education partners and not to support a wage cap on teachers' salaries’ but it tends to look ludicrous when it is considered that his party with Catriona Ruane at the helm shafted the classroom assistants in the North only a year ago because Peter Robinson’s budget demanded it. A very partitionist approach to budgets is it not? A right wing assault on education facilities in the North and left wing resistance in the South.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that Sinn Fein’s sabre rattling all amounts to a bit of envy, really, that Fianna Fail and the Greens rather than their own lot are in a position to shaft our schoolchildren. Par for the course with Sinn Fein: do a lot of shouting about policy when all it is they really want changed is people. Their people in, other people out, the type of change that means things remain as they were. Careerist politics, no more, no less. This gives the critique of Fianna Fail and the Greens a vacuous ring, meaning it will most likely wither on the vine rather than bloom into electoral success for Sinn Fein.

Given that, in terms of its own self image as both the cutting edge of Northern nationalism and the driving force behind any movement in the direction of a united Ireland, calamity follows back to back on debacle, there is a view that Sinn Fein has lost its way, is devoid of all strategic direction and flails around hopelessly waiting for some unspecified cavalry to ride over the hill and pull it out of the hole it has dug for itself. Those of this view find no shortage of material for their critique in the North’s ministry of education.

At no point in her ministerial career has Catriona Ruane scaled the heights of Mount Competence. In the North the education minister and her advisors are widely regarded, even by British officials, as being inept bunglers who think acumen is an alien body that must be zapped at all costs. Ruane’s handling of the academic selection controversy is a case in point. Her determination to end the 11 plus may indeed be laudable but nobody seems to know what it is she wants to replace it with. And because of indecisiveness she has allowed a head of steam to build up which is causing much of the turbulence her ministerial flight is experiencing.

Writing in his own blog a northern Protestant nationalist blogger claimed that ‘Catriona Ruane seems to know absolutely nothing about education.’ It is a challenge to find evidence to contradict him. She seems concerned more with finding scapegoats than solutions. Last year she hit out at radical proposals for improvements in the education system on the grounds that there was not enough finance. Her opponents on the matter were accused being ‘ostriches with their heads in the sand’. The British who were responsible for the amount of money given to the department seemed to have not been subject to her opprobrium. Ruane takes the view that the media is behind the difficulties faced by her department. ‘Look at who controls the media and in whose interest the media works … there is, and I am putting this in inverted commas, the old boys’ network and I think that is what you are seeing.’

Mediocrats out to destroy the education process. Aye, right. It might be more plausible to argue that because of the nepotism that saturates the Stormont career structure she sits astride a jobs-for-the-boys network and as a result has been denied the input of competent advisors.

Despite the intellectual emaciation of the Sinn Fein body politic Ruane’s policies paradoxically would make any future merger between it and Fianna Fail much easier to implement. And the more disastrous education policy becomes in the South who better to run it than Ruane and her advisors? They can hardly claim lack of experience.

First published in Fourthwrite Winter 2008 Issue 34