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Fortnight Publications Ltd.
Ireland's Share in StrasbourgAuthor(s): Nollaig O. GadhraSource: Fortnight, No. 131 (Aug. 13, 1976), pp. 6-7Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25545921 .
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6/FORTNIGHT
education on the cheap, and the estimates of cost suggested in the
report, appear to be very inadequate.
Neighbourhood comprehensives
The second area of concern is the
Consultative Document's reluctance to admit to the desirability of single class, neighbourhood comprehensive schools. ''Ideally", the report claims,
"a comprehensive school would recruit its pupils from all socio economic groupings and would cater for the full range of educational need at secondary level". Many schools in a
neighbourhood system would receive
"only part of the ability range and some will have such a proportion of
weak pupils that they will almost
inevitably sink to a lowly position in
public esteem". In this argument lurks the fallacious assumption that
most of the community's intelligence resides in the upper socio economic
classes, that, in fact, you need a quota of middle class brains to make
working class schools work. Hence the
ugly spectre of bussing. Three points need to be made here.
Firstly, there is recognition of the enormous importance of the educa
tional dynamic an individual school
may generate, particularly a school
under the leadership of an imaginative Head, supported by an able staff.
Again, reflecting on the experience of the 1960s, our best secondary inter
mediate schools, which often served
working class, urban areas, built up
strong academic traditons leading to the creation of sixth forms with
memberships well in excess of one hundred. And this was done within the constraints of a selective system which creamed off the bright working class child to a grammar school who, under
reorganisation, might go to the local
comprehensive. Again, the tremen
dous academic record of St Louise's School on the Falls Road, despite operating within a selective system and serving an area of apparent social
deprivation, is testimony to the
importance of the individual school's educational dynamic.
Secondly, there is the need, not mentioned in the report, for massive
programmes of "positive discrimina tion" in favour of schools serving areas
of special need. This may involve
greater expenditure on facilities, incentives to attract the best qualified teachers, and the provision of a lower
teacher/pupil ratio. Only by "positive discrimination" can we hope to create
equality of opportunity for pupils attending schools serving areas
ravaged by either redevelopment or
the troubles.
Thirdly, the idea of comprehensive schooling is to meet more adequately the diversity of educational needs of the pupils who attend it. The report itself claims that "no school should be
judged on a narrow range of academic
achievement". Therefore it is incon sistent to be ultimately implying that a
good comprehensive must have so
many "O" or "A" level candidates.
What a good comprehensive should do
is to provide opportunities for anyone who has academic abilities to have them fully developed. But a
comprehensive must, as a whole, be
judged by the adequacy with which it meets all the social and educational needs ofthe pupils attending it. There can be no shirking the need to re educate pupils, parents, teachers, administrators and public alike, to take a broader view of what education is about, and of the wide variety of
needs an individual school may have to meet.
The way ahead We must not fall into the trap of
thinking that having abolished selection we have created comprehen sive education, or that by changing the names of schools we will change what
goes on in them. Policies of positive discrimination, massive in-service
training programmes, and an
extended advisory service on the curriculum and aspects of school
organisation, will be needed to make the new system work effectively. Ultimately the success or failure of
reorganisation will depend on the commitment of teachers to its under
lying philosophy and on the adequacy of their teaching and administrative skills in implementing comprehensive principles in both the classroom and school organisation.
Robert Crone is a teacher attached to the Schools Curriculum Project, based in the Institute of Education, Queen's
University.
Ireland's Share in Strasbourg
After the decision to hold direct elections to the European Parliament,
NOLLAIG O GADHRA gives a
Southern view of how the voting could be conducted on an all-Ireland
basis.
The most important thing about the
announcement that the EEC countries
intend to hold direct elections to the
European Parliament by the middle of
1978 is that it gives an air of reality to
the various debates in the member
countries about the form such elections should take. It also suggests a continuing political will to forge ahead with the ideal of European
political union despite all the setbacks
the EEC has experienced in recent
years, due largely to the economic recession.
There is little unity among EEC heads of government, never mind
ordinary citizens, about the role or
form the Parliament should take. But most now realise that until the members of the Parliament are
directly elected and become account able to the voters of the Nine there is little hope of it ever getting the wider
powers it will need to become a
genuine forum for democratic decision in Western Europe. The degree to
which even the committed "Euro
peans" disagree can be seen from the
decision to leave the details of
conducting the 1978 election to each
national government. The number of
representatives from each country has been decided. We should now be concerned with this question of the
type of election, especially.
The Irish Republic has been allocated 15 seats in the new enlarged
assembly. This represents 3.66% of the 410 seats, and while it falls short of the 5% we had hoped to retain it is still considerably larger than the
percentage the Republic would be entitled to if allocation were by popu lation alone. The dramatic rise in rep
resentation of the four largest coun
tries?France, Italy, West Germany and the UK?clearly shows that they intend their weight to be felt in the
new phase of European cooperation, and that there will be little deviation from the principle of seats in
proportion to population.
North and South When Mr Cosgrave returned from
the EEC summit, he seemed to be as
happy with the Northern Ireland allo cation as he was with that which, we
assume, he helped to get for the South. Northern Ireland has been given three of the 81 UK seats, and some
politicians hope that the third seat will
provide a voice for the Northern
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FRIDAY 13th AUGUST 1976/7
minority in Strasbourg. Thus Ireland as a whole (and even Unionists admit that there are many major EEC
questions, agriculture for example, which are better handled on an
all-Ireland basis) will have 18 seats. It
is interesting to note that of these 15 have gone to the Republic, even
though it has only double the
population of the Six Counties. What is more interesting is that no demand
came, not even from Fianna Fail or
the SDLP, that the share-out of Irish seats should be made on an island
basis?despite all the talk of a "common European approach" when
entry into the Community was
being discussed. This means that the allocation of election areas (and it is
generally conceded that there should be a number of areas if only to
represent the various regional problems) is going to suffer from the same distortion of historical, geogra phic and economic logic that the island in general has endured since 1920. It even seems likely that there
will be different methods of election in the different parts of the island and in the different counties of divided
Ulster.
Squeezing Labour out In the South it seems likely that the
usual system of Proportional Repre sentation will be used in multi-seat
constituencies, in keeping with the
policies and interests of the Labour
Party and to a lesser degree those of Fine Gael, despite Mr Cosgrave's personal reservations about PR.
Population imbalance within the
Republic, where roughly a third now live in the greater Dublin area, will create problems. In the next Dail the 148 seats will be divided as follows:
Ulster (3 counties).10 seats
Connacht.20 seats
Munster.43 seats
Dublin (City & County).43 seats Rest of Leinster.32 seats This is likely to apply for more than a decade because of the cancellation of this year's census, and shows that for
the first time Leinster (including Dublin) will command an overall
majority. So will the desire of Labour to retain
the two voices in Strasbourg it has now. Labour have no chance in Con
nacht or the Republic's three Ulster counties. Their chances in Munster are doubtful. So they will demand the internal division of seats strictly on
population lines, probably seeking a
European constituency for Dublin and another for the rest of Leinster. Labour would probably favour five
seat electoral areas to ensure a 2-2-1
division of seats for Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and Labour respectively. This would mean that there would be only three areas in the entire Republic and that the whole of Connact and perhaps
Donegal would be lumped with Munster, the Ulster counties of Cavan and Monaghan being included in an
enlarged "Leinster", with Dublin
having an ^irea to itself. In translating this into European
terms, voices will probably be raised in favour of concessions for the "Western areas", though what an extra voice in
Strasbourg might achieve for the "West" is not clear. The participation of Labour in the National Coalition Government, and their weak position in the West will probably ensure that any concessions will be minimal. More
importantly, there are indications that Fine Gael are not exactly anxious to accommodate Labour in the fight for seats in Europe. There is a strong element in Fine Gael which aspires to a two-party Fine Gael/Fianna Fail
system and would be glad to go it alone at home also if they could do without Labour support.
Mr Denis Jones, the Fine Gael Co Limerick TD and Deputy Speaker of the Dail, proposed in the Limerick
Weekly Echo recently four electoral areas in the Republic; three 4-seaters (for Dublin, Leinster and Munster) and one 3-seater (for Connacht/ Ulster). The real attraction of this system is that it would probably result in a 2-2 division in the first three cases and a 2-1 division in Ulster/ Connacht between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, thus eliminating Labour, except perhaps in Dublin, where FF might be reduced to one seat.
Boosting British image One assumes that the Northern
Ireland elections will be on the same lines as those in the UK, though the
matter is complicated by what seems to be an unwritten agreement to ensure one of the three seats for the
"minority". A 2-1 "power-sharing"
delegation would look good for the British image in Europe, but of course it is not as simple as that. If there are to be three electoral areas in the north, each returning one member, it is
pretty certain that the two furthest east will go to some type of Unionists.
Apparently Mr Cosgrave hoped on his return from the summit that a 'green'
representative would be returned from a NI area west of the Bann. While it would be possible to devise an area,
including Fermanagh, Tyrone, and the greater part of Derry, with a
Nationalist majority, there is no
guarantee that the seat would go to John Hume or some other prominent SDLP man as Mr Cosgrave, and also the British Government it seems,
would wish. In the two Westminster elections of 1974, SDLP failed to establish itself in Fermanagh/South Tyrone. The seat went first to Harry West and then to Frank McGuire, whose sympathies are broadly in line with Kevin Street Sinn Fein. Even if an agreed "Nationalist" candidate
emerged for Europe, he would
probably be very different from the
type of "minority" voice which Mr
Cosgrave or Mr Rees might like. He
might also find it very difficult to get elected unless PR voting in single-seat areas (along the lines of Southern by elections) were allowed as a "special
measure" in the North.
All-Ireland share-out The failure to present an all-Ireland
allocation of seats for the European Parliament will lead not only to some
unusual horse trading North and
South, but also to highly unsatisfac
tory representation for that part of the island which needs most EEC attention?the partitioned areas on
both sides of the border. There will
probably be difficulties west of the Bann in the Six Counties, while there is every possibility that considerations further south will mean that the two
parts of Ulster in the Republic, Donegal and Cavan/Monaghan, will be represented by two different sets of
representatives. It is a sad reflection on our maturity that everybody shies
away from talk of a nine-county Ulster
simply because the Provos have articulated the idea. Yet if one were to allocate the 18 Irish seats in
Strasbourg to reflect population and
geographic realities, the following might make sense:
Leinster (including Dublin).... 6 seats
Ulster. 5 seats
Munster.4 seats
Connacht.3 seats That is, of course, if our politicians,
including our so-called "Republican parties", in the South were prepared to put aside their prejudices and selfish interests for once.
Nollaig O Gadhra's latest book, John
Boyle O'Reilly Agus An Glor Gael
Mheiriceanach, is published by Foil seachain Naisiunta.
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