IN a political sense Niamh Bhreathnach won the Lottery. She gained a portfolio at a time when money was more fluairseach than at any period in living memory, and when the demographic pressures were beginning to ease.
She became Minister in a Government where the bigger partner would acquiesce in everything other than imposing sky-diving as an integral part of the Leaving Cert: Fine Gael would bear any burden in order to stay in Government, and had, anyway, sustained enough education-sector punishment during Gemma Hussey's time to do them for a decade or more.
The last few years have been the best of times for a Minister for Education. Niamh Bhreathnach found herself in arguably the best position presented to any Minister for Education, including Donogh O'Malley, to play out "the vision thing".
That vision thing earned itself impassioned references in the recent debate about prison spaces and "zero tolerance". Again and again, it was pointed out that if you want a society where people and property are respected, if you want cities safe for people of both sexes to walk after dusk, if you want to prevent drug addiction and the crimes it spawns, then you start at the very beginning: at school or better still, pre-school.
At a time when so many children live within dysfunctional families, we have to hope that our educational system can be shaped so as to inculcate socially positive behaviour and attitudes.
We have to have that hope. Otherwise we face the prospect of an uncaring unconnected society tilted towards the young man who, interviewed on radio this week on his feelings about having killed a woman when "joy-riding", was genuinely confused by the question. He didn't really have feelings about it, he eventually worked out: it was a while since she had got killed.
Listening, one had the chilled realisation that, to this young man, his victim was less than human, less than real, and that a few years had severed any transient connection he might have felt with her.
It is not realistic to hope that the education system will fill all gaps and prevent all criminality, but there is consensus among those who study child development, who observe patterns of criminality that the education system could and should make an enormous contribution in this area.
If we look at the education system as developed and enhanced by Niamh Bhreathnach, we see little evidence of it being better geared to make that contribution as a result.
We have seen the system respond with speed and without counting the cost to pressure from big multinational corporations worried that in 10 years' time they're going to run out of electronics engineers.
The Taoiseach himself moved to ensure the supply of educated human raw material wouldn't be in short supply. This certainty of supply lines they will be able to share with Governor Lonergan of Mountjoy Prison, because the education system Niamh Bhreathnach leaves behind won't diminish the numbers presenting to him and his peers.
If the Government, the Labour Party or Niamh Bhreathnach were serious about presenting all the people of the nation, no matter what their economic or geographic background, with equal choices; if they wished to interrupt the cycles of deprivation which end and start again in our prisons, then the preschool and primary school areas would, in the past couple of years, have experienced a quantum leap in the attention paid them and the money invested in them.
This is the most important area of education. It needs enormous immediate investment in buildings, in personnel, particularly in remedial and psychological personnel. Ireland needs imaginative programmes of pre-schooling which involve the whole family so teenage mothers can be helped to learn parenting skills. In primary schools, were class sizes to come down in a real and sustained way, this could make a substantial contribution in areas of deprivation where parents find it difficult to keep their children at school.
THE teachers' unions this week at their conferences discussed issues like rat-infested schools and bad conditions for pupils much more than in the old days, when, such conferences tended to major on pay and conditions for teachers. The goodwill and concern for the outcome of the educational process is clearly there.
Unfortunately, that goodwill and concern is not matched by a Minister who tends to err on the side of control, rather than contribution. This is a Minister determined to act as a corrective force, breaking the hold of the church on Irish education, rather than as a catalyst, facilitating all those involved in this vital sector to reach a new collective vision of what is possible and desirable in the new century.
Take the issue of the church's hand in education. Personally and politically, I have fought the controlling interests of the church on our society at least as much as Niamh Bhreathnach. In the 1990s, we are a secular, liberal Ireland where no church can presume itself vested with special rights and powers rooted in past contributions to the sector.
It is nonetheless important to understand the context before you set out to change the text. The context is that the Catholic Church in Ireland, for more than a century, was the educational force creating the foundation of literacy and numeracy on which has been built our current educational boasts.
Not only did it set up the infrastructure, investing money and human resources, but its commitment to education provided more than one generation of women with options of personal development, not to mention power and influence, which in 19th-century Ireland did not otherwise exist. Its is all too easy to allow that contribution to be dismissed as a result of recent allegations of abuse and exploitation.
In addition, when looking at the context, any Minister in fin de siecle Ireland knows a simple truth: the powers that be, in church terms, are disappearing. Some religious are beginning to withdraw from particular areas because they no longer have the priests, brothers or the sisters to do the work. Some orders are trying (in my view pointlessly) to create ways of maintaining their "ethos" through the coming generations of lay teachers and lay management.
One way or the other, the teaching religious are disappearing. So Niamh Bhreathnach, in essence, "was pushing a closing door. Yet she managed to push it with gratuitous force. Trying to break the church's hold on Irish education and to break traditional structures, her education Bills have ended up as assaults on the Constitution.
This week might serve as a microcosm, representing Niamh Bhreathnach's capacity to start from a strong and winning base, yet alienate large sections of the teaching community, those sections describing her as "patronising", "insulting", and "ignoring" them. One speaker at the ASTI annual conference summed up a key failing demonstrated by the Minister: her promises of "consultation" in situations where consultation would be meaningless.
Promises, promises...
There was, for example, the promise that universities would be freed by her Bill to exploit their potential to the fullest, yet her published Bill imposed a formula which failed to recognise their experimental and developmental role and instead locked them into a semi-state type of structure.
Over-promising and under-delivering is lethal for a commercial entity. It doesn't do a Minister any good, either.