Micheal Martin is a smart operator. He had a large piece of good news to announce last week - £57 million to tackle educational disadvantage - and he did not want it to be swallowed up in the across-the-board good news being revealed in Charlie McCreevy's Budget.
He was able to persuade the Minister for Finance to break with precedent and let him announce his package the morning after the Budget, thus getting lead billing on the evening news and headlines in the following day's newspapers. It is only the latest example of why Martin is seen as the most successful Minister in Bertie Ahern's cabinet, and is even being touted as a potential future Taoiseach.
Not surprisingly, a package proclaimed by the Minister as unprecedented in the history of the state, was warmly welcomed by teachers, parents, management bodies, student and youth groups alike. He will have drawn much of the poison out of the staffing and funding dispute with the INTO by his appointment of 450 new teachers - half of them at primary - to provide remedial and homeschool liaison services. The extra funding for children with disabilities, on top of the £8 million already announced, was also universally popular.
Another widely welcomed element was the nearly £7 million aimed at helping students from poorer backgrounds to get to college; removing a discriminatory anomaly in grants to mature students; and assisting students, many of them disadvantaged, who drop out without completing their courses. It's to be hoped that this will give a kick-start to the extremely unimpressive efforts of some third level institutions in this area.
THE £3.2 million for adult literacy, another badly neglected area, is also welcome. With recent dramatic falls in the unemployment rate, the Government seems finally to be waking up to the realisation that we are fast running out of young people to fill job vacancies, and that adults who were poorly served by the education system 20 and 30 years ago will have to be re-educated and re-trained to fill the gap.
How this relatively small amount of adult literacy funding will be spent in such a huge area of need is open to question. The same thing could be said for other elements of the package. The director of the Combat Poverty Agency, Hugh Frazer, was not the only person to comment that a list of spending projects, however welcome, was no substitute for a coherent, well-targeted strategy to deal with educational disadvantage.
What guarantee is there, for example, that the bulk of the £57 million will go where it is most needed, to the 40 areas of urban blight and extreme poverty identified by the Minister in change of local development, Chris Flood, the day after Mr Martin's announcement? When the bright new schools, nurseries, adult education centres and training workshops start making a difference in Dublin's north inner-city, Fatima Mansions, Jobstown and Togher, then we will know that the Minister for Education's largesse is being well-spent.
