We have, in this country, a great talent for fiction. So great, indeed, that it cannot be confined to the realms of James Joyce, Kate O'Brien and John McGahern. Our fictions are too important to be left to the novelists, so they burst through into public policy.
The finest example of this creative flair is in the story we are telling ourselves about where we go after the Celtic Tiger. We're moving towards "a vibrant, knowledge-based economy". It's all going to be about how smart we are, how skilled our workforce is, how innovative and creative we can be.
We like this story because it feeds into one of the great myths of Irish culture. We see ourselves as exceptionally well-educated and naturally creative. So the "knowledge-based economy" sounds like a game that will play to our strengths. The only problem with the story is that it lacks one of the key ingredients of good fiction - credibility. It bears so little relation to where we are, and to what the Government is actually doing, that it has to be classified, not as gritty realism, but as fantasy.
The truth is that Ireland is a massively undereducated country. A startling 35 per cent of Irish adults aged between 25 and 64 do not have even a Leaving Certificate. Our level of working-age population with at least upper secondary-level education is below the averages of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) developed countries and the European Union. More significantly, given our pretensions to be at the leading edge of knowledge economies, we are way behind the top performers. We've got 65 per cent of the working-age population with a Leaving Certificate equivalent. The Czechs have 90 per cent, the US 88 per cent, Canada 85 per cent, Germany 83 per cent, Austria 81 per cent, Korea 76 per cent.
Half a million Irish adults (a quarter of the adult population) are functionally illiterate - a figure that shocked us when it was published in an international study in 1997. But it didn't shock us so much that we know what the figure is now.
When the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Education and Science published a report on adult literacy last year, it stated that "it may be that the number has increased since then" or "it may also have declined". Because the figures hit so hard at our self-image as an educated, sophisticated society, we haven't bothered to find out what's happened to illiteracy in Ireland over the last decade.
So not only are we ignorant, but we're ignorant about our level of ignorance. As Tomás Ó Slatara of the Irish Primary Principals' Network pointed out earlier this year, the State can trace every single cow from birth to dinner plate, but it knows very little about our children. A thousand children a year get lost between primary and secondary school.
Some of the problem is historic - a legacy of the very late introduction of free secondary education. This is all the more reason why we should have one of the developed world's best systems of adult education, allowing us to catch up. Instead, we have one of the worst.
The percentage of students aged over 30 is among the lowest in the EU - less than 2 per cent, compared to an average of 7 per cent and a high of 22 per cent in the UK.
But much of the problem is happening right now, in the midst of our prosperity. In spite of our young population and huge adult education deficit, State spending on education is well below the OECD average and, as a percentage of gross domestic product, just above Brazil and on a par with Russia. A third of children in disadvantaged areas have serious literacy and numeracy problems, and standards have barely improved since 1980. More than a quarter of primary school pupils are being taught in classes with more than 30 pupils.
School attendance - the basic requirement for educational attainment - is a serious problem. Ten per cent of all primary students miss more than 20 days of school each year. Twenty per cent of secondary students under 16 miss more than 20 days. In all, 84,000 children under 16 miss 20 days and 30,000 miss up to 40 days.
The Government takes none of this seriously. Last month, when the OECD issued its report showing the very low levels of State spending on education and highlighting our achievement in having the largest class sizes in the EU, Mary Hanafin issued a statement welcoming this evidence that "once again the Irish education system is performing very strongly".
The National Education Welfare Board, which needs 300 staff to cope with the attendance problem, actually has 94 staff, including just 73 hands-on welfare officers. The National Educational Psychological Service, which is supposed to have one psychologist for every 5,000 pupils, actually has one for every 7,000.
But none of this matters because we're heading for "a vibrant, knowledge-based economy" and we don't have to make it happen. As in all good fairy tales, the happy ending will arrive by magic.