At 37 the new Minister for Education is the Cabinet's youngest member. Micheal Martin has the energy and idealism of a young politician still untouched by the cares and hard-won compromises of office. In the inter-departmental dogfight now starting for money from next year's budget estimates, he will be hoping that his closeness to the Taoiseach and his passionate arguments that education should be put at the centre of a knowledge-based economy will give him the edge over more senior colleagues.
On the legislative front, the Minister has a heavy programme. He hopes to publish a new Education Bill before Christmas, minus the previous government's proposed regional education boards. A School Attendance Bill to raise the school-leaving age to 16 and set up new structures for tracking and enforcing attendance will also be presented to the Cabinet this autumn. This will show no substantial change from the last government's legislation except for the removal of any mention of education boards.
Other legislation he will be working on will include a Bill, or amended legislation, to broaden the membership and underpin the future of the VECs; a Bill to regulate the RTCs, turn them into technological colleges and certify their qualifications; and, in the longer-term, a Bill to set up a Teachers' Council.
On the left of Fianna Fail, Martin puts educational disadvantage at the top of his shopping list. He quotes EU Social Affairs Commissioner Padraig Flynn that "to deal with disadvantage generally in society, and particularly in education, intervention must begin at the very early stages."
To this end, he plans to have a National Forum for Early Education, perhaps the most neglected of Ireland's educational sectors, "up and running" before Christmas. He is critical of the low-level, incoherent and overlapping provision which exists at present, with seven Government Departments and agencies involved and some hard-working groups, such as community pre-school play groups, feeling they have been largely excluded from the process.
Similarly in the primary sector, Martin is beginning to look at a new scheme to change the emphasis of Niamh Bhreathnach's Breaking the Cycle initiative, which put significant numbers of extra teachers into 156 schools in disavantaged areas. He would like to see resources spread around a larger number of such schools, and to bring in homeschool liaison teachers, counsellors and psychologists as well as teachers.
In rural schools in particular he envisages the appointment of more remedial teachers to tackle disadvantage in the form of children with reading, writing, and other learning problems. He hopes that the funding will be available to allow him to "substantially" implement the commitment in the Programme for Government to give rural one-teacher schools with over 10 pupils a second teacher in time for the 1998-1999 academic year.
The minister has already got funding from the EU for a scheme to deal with the problem of dropping-out in the eight-15 age group - about 1,000 children fail to make it to second level and another 5,000 do not complete the Junior Cert course. This will involve closer liaison between schools and youth services, so that children who are expelled or drop out can be helped to get back into mainstream schooling.
Martin accepts that some youth workers already "perform miracles" in this difficult area, but says that in the past many of them have suffered from a lack of co-operation from schools. He admits that increased funding to services working with disadvantaged young people will depend a lot on Europe - in the past, he says, we have not been grateful enough in acknowledging the £125 million per year the EU has "ploughed into Irish education."
The need to deal with educational disadvantage will be a strong feature of Ireland's case for continuing large sums of EU funding after 1999, he says. For all our talk about our excellent education system, our pupil-teacher ratios and the basic infrastructure of school buildings and equipment are still inferior to our more developed European partners.
The Minister's own political philosophy is closely linked to the struggle to help less-favoured children find their way in the world through education. "Most children, despite all the difficulties, will jump the hoops and will attain Leaving Cert and third-level qualifications that will enhance their capacities," he says. "It must be a fundamental objective of society to try to help those who are not finishing school at the moment, to give them the same chance of an enhanced quality of life. Because if they don't complete some educational programme or get some qualification, their quality of life will be diminished for the rest of their lives. That's the social obligation on us as a government, and that's my number one priority."
Computer literacy, another Programme for Government commitment, is a key area for the new Minister. More specifically, Fianna Fail promised in its election manifesto that within two years every school and within five years every classroom would have a multimedia computer with internet access.
Micheal Martin does not "understand the logic" of "young people going on to third level, even completing an honours degree, and then going into FAS for six months' computer programming to be able to get a job." He wants students to come out of second level with those kind of employable skills.
He will be pushing hard in the estimates negotiations for "a major programme" to equip more schools with computers; to start to fully use information technology to improve teaching and learning right across the curriculum; and as a separate subject at both Junior Cert and Leaving Cert.
This, Martin believes, should be a priority not only for the Department of Education. "Society as a whole must accept that social and economic progress in the future will all be based on this information revolution."
A week after coming into office he sat down with a group of multinational computer company heads. They promised "phenomenal" job growth in the years ahead, but stressed that "the single most important ingredient we have for attracting such investment to this country is the number of young skilled people emanating from our educational system and that continued investment in education is essential to maintain that."
He hopes that the funding will be released to get the proposed National Centre for Technology in Education, based at Dublin City University, up and running by the end of this year. It will develop and co-ordinate a national policy on information and communications technologies in schools.
At second level, Martin believes the viability of smaller second-level schools in rural Ireland is tied closely to the range of subjects they offer, and his emphasis in this sector will be on "maintaining subject choice."
In his first two months, the new Minister has found that the area with the greatest financial problems is third level, with its high unit costs and insatiable appetite for further investment. He says he could use £70 million "without even going near" the £50 million package which the Lindsay Committee says will be needed to enable third-level colleges to train people to cope with skills shortages over the next five years.
He sees the private sector further increasing its already growing investment in universities and technological colleges and recognises that the Government will have to be "imaginative" in its approach to the tax system to facilitate this.
Martin is scathing about suggestions that raising the student service charge to £250 is some back-door way of reintroducing undergraduate fees, stressing that the amounts brought in by such an increase are "a drop in the ocean" in the context of the sector's overall needs. Whatever his criticisms of Niamh Breathnach's scrapping of fees, he recognises now the strong feeling of PAYE earners that the old system was discriminatory, and has no plans to reintroduce them.
He hopes that the reactivated Higher Education Authority committee to monitor the spending of the service charge will ensure that a proper proportion of it goes to student services. He acknowledges that some colleges have better records than others in this area - he regards the Dublin Institute of Technology as a model which could be copied nationally.
More EU Structural Funds money for the Post Leaving Cert sector is another item on the Minister's list. The PLCs have been victims of their own success in that the number of students has soared without the required investment in infrastructure. The release of the promised grants for PLC students will depend on the largesse of the Minister for Finance, but will not be before next year.
