Garret FitzGerald: A feature of our present immigration is the high level of educational attainment of so many of those currently arriving on our shores.
This reflects the fact that, out of 51,000 foreign immigrants arriving during the 12 months ended April last, more than half came from eastern European countries, and five of these, including Poland, have populations with a higher ratio than Ireland of people with at least upper-secondary education.
Because of linguistic problems many of these well-educated eastern European immigrants are currently undertaking work here that is much less intellectually demanding than the jobs they had in their own countries. Pay differentials between Ireland and eastern Europe are such that even unskilled jobs here offer much higher wages than these immigrants can earn at home.
For those who decide to remain here, the acquisition of more fluent English should in time enable them to upgrade to jobs more in tune with their education.
The speed with which our own population has been improving its average education level is quite remarkable. Between 1991 and 2002 the number of people with third-level education more than doubled, from just over 300,000 to almost 650,000, and our census data suggest that by the year after next half of those aged 25-29 who have completed their education will hold a third-level qualification, two-thirds of them at degree level.
This rapid progress has, moreover, been achieved without a lowering of education standards, such as appears to have been taking place in Britain, both at secondary school examination level and also in some universities.
In the National University of Ireland the comments of external examiners, three-quarters of them from outside the State, suggest that our standards may, if anything, be on the high side.
A valuable feature of the Irish university system is the relative uniformity of standards. Of course, there are some variations, but the overall standard applied in the awarding of degrees does not vary greatly between our universities; in marked contrast to Britain or the US, where an employer has to be able to distinguish between the very different quality of degrees awarded by different institutions.
The three principal features of the education system that have attracted industrial and service investments to Ireland have been the breadth of the secondary school curriculum; the high standards of university degrees; and the availability of post-school training and education facilities at local level in the institutes of technology.
External investors compare our school system, and also that of Scotland, favourably with those of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, where too early specialisation for A-level purposes gets in the way of a rounded education.
Another important feature of our second-level system is the high level of educational motivation. Except in very disadvantaged areas, parental concerns about children emigrating without an adequate level of education led most parents to motivate their children powerfully in favour of educational effort.
Moreover, strong teacher unions have ensured that teachers are relatively well paid, and consequently are strongly motivated by comparison with badly paid teachers in many other countries.
This motivation factor explains why, despite persistent underfunding, the quality of those emerging from the educational system and the high proportion of young people attaining each level of education are so impressive.
Much remains to be done. While the high motivation of both students and teachers has helped to mitigate the problem of large classes, especially at primary level, there is nevertheless a clear need to reduce class sizes, especially in schools with a large intake of pupils from disadvantaged homes.
There is also an urgent need, which does not appear to be recognised yet by those who administer the system, to secure the educational integration of ethnic minorities.
Recent events in France may now belatedly shake our complacency in relation to this matter. We already have at least one national school where it is reported that 70 per cent of the current intake are non-nationals, despite the fact that experience elsewhere has established a clear need to ensure that the percentage of immigrant children in any school does not exceed 30 per cent.
This is necessary so that the immigrant children may be helped by the majority of Irish fellow-pupils in their class both to acquire a good command of English and to become fully integrated into our society. Also so that Irish children do not find themselves held back because standards are affected by an excessive ethnic imbalance in the school and classroom.
Given the huge scale of current immigration in relation to population - higher than anywhere else in Europe except perhaps tiny Luxembourg - and given that 40 per cent of immigrants in the past six years have come from outside the EU and the US, if we do not soon address this problem we are clearly liable eventually to end up with a French-type crisis in some parts of the country.
The French school system failed to secure integration because of the geographical concentration of immigrants in particular areas. That pattern has also begun to emerge here, and in tackling this problem we face an additional problem: the confessional nature of the school system.
Because our school system is already religiously segregated, we have recently had to concede the establishment of two segregated Muslim schools, where the children of immigrants have no opportunity of becoming integrated into society. Neither our churches nor the State have yet been prepared to recognise where that could lead us in the future. This is part of a more general problem, for more than one-tenth of our people (one-sixth in Dublin) are now non-Christian, or have no religion, or are insufficiently interested even to state whether they are affiliated to a religion.
The denominational structure of the education system is now raising a range of issues that both church and State must start to address.