WHEN Kay Bailey left school in Donegal more than 30 years ago to come to Dublin to work in a hairdressing shop, further and higher education were the last things on her mind.
She always had "a lurking feeling I could do other things". Later she got "immense satisfaction" from bringing up two children in Dundrum in south Dublin, but continued to feel there was "another part of me which had to be taken care of too".
She was in her late 30s when her life changed. She came across a leaflet in the local library advertising courses put on by DATE (Dundrum Adult Training and Education) and decided to do a morning course called "Enjoying English" while her children were at school. Within a few months her tutor persuaded her to do Leaving Cert English, and within a year her natural organisational skills had been recognised and she was part of the group managing DATE.
With her children reared, she decided to apply for a FAS "return to work" training scheme. She was rejected. She believes this was due to a combination of not being on the live register - a problem faced by many women at home who would like to return to paid work - and because her lack of office skills were deemed to make her unsuitable for retraining.
The rejection did not deter her. She had decided by this time that she wanted to work in adult education and guidance. She was accepted on to Maynooth's diploma course in Adult and Continuing Education, one of the few available to take people on the basis, not of their paper qualifications, but of their experience of working in the community. She graduated from the two year part time course with first class honours.
At the same time she was doing a course run by AONTAS, the National Association for Adult Education, under the "New Opportunities for Women" programme, on social analysis and political lobbying.
This made her start asking all kinds of questions, such as why there was no systematic funding of Irish adult education and why VECs continued to insist that adult education classes had to be "self financing".
She wondered why the thousands of women who take personal development courses helping them achieve the self esteem and self confidence they are not accorded for their work in the home - are not deemed by the Department of Education to be "second chance" students.
Most recently she did a Royal Society of Arts diploma in Management of Community Groups, which allowed her for the first time "to document all the things I had done as a member of a management group and chairwoman of a network of adult education groups". This "translated the voluntary work I had done into something an employer would recognise as an employable set of skills". Now she works for AONTAS as part of its information and promotional team, and also fund raises for the Shanty "second chance" education project in Tallaght.
She lists half a dozen government Departments involved in some form of adult education, and wonders why there is so little mention of it in the Education Bill.
She thinks privileged people who have risen smoothly through the mainstream education system have no idea of the huge self confidence needed by an underprivileged person trying to overcome the obstacles to a "second chance".
The barriers to "lifelong learning" in Ireland are still enormous, she says. They range from the cost of courses, a lack of child care facilities, and the "huge gap" left by the absence of any kind of comprehensive advice and guidance service for people seeking information about access to this much talked about new route to education. For Kay Bailey there is still a long way from the rhetoric of the politicians to the reality of a group of women trying to start a course in Dundrum or Tallaght.