The schools are reopening, and it's as if they never closed. There was hardly a let-up in the posturing and pieties over third-level fees (right up to exam time, thank you, gentlemen), then the palaver over fee-paying schools, writes Kathy Sheridan.
Remember how the righteous galloped into battle on behalf of the educational "have-nots", targeting the gratifyingly ill-defined "middle classes", the most predictable of scapegoats?
Remember the tentative voices that tried to temper that "debate" by suggesting that resistance might be less about middle-class rapacity than a suspicion that educational inequality was a tad more complex than third-level exclusion?
And that if the Minister bothered to reveal just how he intended to dispense the fabulous fees bonanza - all of €15.5 million tops, according to his Department's belated report - we might be persuaded that his crusade amounted to more than a Band-Aid for sneaky third-level spending cuts. Anyway, he never bothered.
Why? Because the truth behind educational disadvantage is, politically, as boring as hell. It's the fact that next Monday, for the 50,000 or so little boys and girls who sidle up to the doors of Big School for the first time, fate and the system will have already played their hand.
About half these children (the advantaged half, of course) will have had some pre-school, early childhood education, the kind that fires the developing brain and further advantages them for life. Even at four, some are more equal than others.
Just digest the following: "Neurologists have determined that 90 per cent of brain growth occurs by age three . . . Without adequate levels of care and support, without exposure to everyday experiences and stimulation, a child's development may be damaged. Once the critical period (0-4) is past, that system of the brain will never be able to develop or function normally. . . These years are irreplaceable . . .
"Large-scale studies undertaken in the UK in the early 1990s showed that, at the age of seven, children who had experienced pre-school had outperformed their peers in several subject areas. Early intervention is also seen as vital in preventing reading difficulties later in life . . .
"Longer-term improvements in academic achievement have been identified in various studies, with improved retention rates, higher participation in third level and lower rates of grade repetition recorded among the benefits.
"Follow-up evaluation has shown that participants stayed longer at school and were more likely to take a public examination than were non-participants from the same area . . . It is clear that quality education intervention is vital at a very early age, particularly for those who are disadvantaged."
Who says this? It's all in the Department's own White Paper, from 1999. US research shows how the effect of a two-year "head start" programme for poor toddlers lasted for ever.
By the time they were 30, every dollar spent on their nursery years had saved the state $7 later; more of them went to college, owned their homes, were never unemployed or drew benefits or committed crime.
The Irish debate about drop-out rates and disadvantage handily ignores the key point: what makes students want to remain in education?
All the studies shout that virtually every available cent should go to children before they reach school, catching them before the family effect destroys their chances.
Of success at age 16, 66 per cent is due to social background, not inherent talent. British ministers quote these studies incessantly. "If I was a proper socialist, I'd move all higher education funds to early years," the Secretary of State for Education, Charles Clarke, said recently.
And where stands the Republic? The Early Start programme, piloted in the mid-90s by the rainbow coalition, remains a pilot, catering for about 3 per cent of its age cohort, according to Eithne Fitzgerald, author of Labour's childcare policy.
Labour costed a pre-school place for every child at €190 million a year, well under half the amount frittered on the SSIA scheme. A programme to pump money into childcare facilities is perceived to be focused on getting mothers out to work rather than on early education and its associated prerequisites such as excellence in training and teaching standards. This suspicion is borne out by the fact that the €90 million earmarked for early education under the National Development Plan seems to have vanished.
In a classic Irish scenario, the Centre for Early Childhood Education, established to develop a quality standard amid fine promises of substantial investment in the sector, continues to do its job.
"But", in the diplomatic words of Noreen Hayes, lecturer in Early Childhood and Child Development in DIT, "the context [the early education sector] in which the centre is working is significantly less resourced than we had anticipated when we started."
What price the disadvantaged now?