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Fintan O’Toole: Is the State producing higher levels of education than it can employ?

Is there a generation that is potentially open to the idea of very radical change? Almost certainly

Has Ireland bred a revolutionary generation? As with almost everything else in the country, the answer is definitely maybe.

History tells us that the worst thing an old regime can do is to educate more people than it can comfortably absorb. That’s how you create a generation of revolutionaries.

The great 17th-century English intellectual and politician Francis Bacon advised King James I that “the great number of grammar schools” in the kingdom was “dangerous”. To have “more scholars bred than the state can prefer and employ … fills the realm full of indigent, idle and wanton people which are but materia rerum novarum” – the stuff of revolutions.

Bacon was quite right. Revolutions are seldom led by the very poor. The workers and peasants may form the body, but the head is usually quite learned. There are exceptions (James Connolly being one) but the typical agitator comes from the ranks of well-educated young people.

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We saw this phenomenon twice in Ireland in the 20th century – in the Irish nationalist revolution and in the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

In his study of the leadership of Sinn Féin and the IRA in the years immediately after 1916, Tom Garvin found that the members of the revolutionary elite were, on average, in their late 20s. They were middle class. And they were much better educated than the general population. “Nearly half,” Garvin wrote, “had achieved third-level education. Many IRA leaders, propagandists and technical instructors were students at, or recent alumni of, the teacher training colleges, or the new university colleges of Dublin, Cork or Galway.”

In Northern Ireland, British post-war education reforms created the opportunity for working-class Catholics to get third-level education in the 1960s. Part of the result was a generation of brilliant firebrands such as Bernadette Devlin, Michael Farrell, Nell McCafferty and Eamonn McCann.

In my lifetime, Ireland has gone from being the worst-educated country in western Europe to the best. It’s the single greatest social transformation in the State’s history: 54 per cent of people aged 25-64 have third-level qualifications.

But is this transformation, in Bacon’s terms, “dangerous”? Are there “more scholars bred than the state can prefer and employ” and who are therefore inclined towards the overthrow of the status quo?

A revolutionary generation is not necessarily formed of unemployed graduates. It’s more likely to be made up of graduates who are employed, but not in jobs that meet their expectations

The answer depends in part on what we mean by “employ”. On one level, it is obvious enough that Ireland is quite a good place in which to get a job. Graduates come here from other European countries looking for work. There is no mass of “indigent, idle and wanton” scholars looking for trouble.

Yet that’s not quite the point. A revolutionary generation is not necessarily formed of unemployed graduates. It’s more likely to be made up of graduates who are employed, but not in jobs that meet their expectations.

And we have an awful lot of these. In recent years, Ireland has been producing or importing young people who are working in jobs for which they are overqualified.

According to a recent report by Ciarán Nugent of the Nevin Institute, three in 10 third-level graduates employed in Ireland are working in occupations where their qualifications are either unutilised or underutilised. In 2019, about 333,500 of our workers were overqualified third-level graduates, accounting for about 15 per cent of all employment.

That’s not even the full story. The mismatch has been getting worse over time and therefore affects young people a lot more. Of the new jobs created in 2008-2019 (123,000), almost three-quarters (90,000) were occupied by third-level graduates underutilising their skills.

Gender and ethnicity weigh heavily on this reality. More women than men are in jobs for which they are overqualified. The problem is also especially acute for highly educated workers who have come here from central and eastern Europe.

So there is certainly evidence that, in this sense, the State is producing higher levels of education than it can “employ”. And, to use Bacon’s other term, it is certainly producing more graduates than it can “prefer”.

The contemporary equivalent of being “preferred” in society is home ownership. All things being equal, you would expect that, as we produce more and more graduates, we would also be increasing the proportion of people in society who can meet this basic definition of being middle-class.

But we’ve actually been doing the opposite. The better educated each generation is in Ireland, the worse its chances of home ownership.

Ireland has made it increasingly hard to be smugly bourgeois. There’s a lot of disappointed expectations under the surface of an apparently thriving economy

More than 60 per cent of those born in the 1960s lived in a home they or their partner owned by the age of 30. The comparable figure for those born in the 1970s was 39 per cent and, for those born in the early 1980s, 32 per cent.

Between these two factors – a lot of people in jobs that do not match their level of education and the breakdown of the system of home ownership – Ireland has made it increasingly hard to be smugly bourgeois. There’s a lot of disappointed expectations under the surface of an apparently thriving economy.

Does this create a potentially revolutionary generation? If by revolutionary we mean a desire for the violent overthrow of the Government and the existing constitutional order, then obviously not.

But is there a generation that is potentially open to the idea of very radical change? Almost certainly.

There are, though, three things that, for now, hold those desires in check. Firstly, unlike in the early 20th century or in the North in the 1960s, there is no wider cause that can give shape to this discontent.

The failure of the British to establish home rule and then the egregious sectarianism of the unionist regime in Stormont meant that the anger of young and well-educated Catholics could pour into a deep channel of national resentment. Sinn Féin would obviously like that to happen again but there is little evidence that a united Ireland is a cause for which this generation of frustrated graduates will go to the barricades.

Secondly, the pull of emigration remains strong. In the contest between what political scientists call “exit” and “voice”, dreams of elsewhere can still form an alternative to action at home.

Third, there’s the reality that Ireland’s ancien régime is already gone. The alliance of Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church that formed the ruling nexus for so long has lost most of its power. From a revolutionary point of view, this makes it harder to say exactly who is to be overthrown.

These factors probably mean that, for now, the hunger for change is likely to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. But if Ireland does not evolve fast enough, the discontent of a generation could well find a more radical expression.