A tale of two communities

St Joseph's national school in Dundalk, Co Louth, is a success story. It was opened in 1979 to service the new estate of Muirhevnamore, which within a decade had developed all the symptoms of a classic deprived area: large numbers of unemployed and single parent families, with the additional problem that a significant proportion of its households were uprooted families from the North.

Principal Gerry Murphy started off with one other teacher. He now has a veritable army of more than 500 children, 26 teachers, and assorted other speech therapists, home-school community co-ordinators, secretarial and classroom assistants, caretakers, cleaners and community workers on the site.

The school itself is an unremarkable, single-storey, redbrick building with six prefabs attached, although its decoration is bright, welcoming and colourfully child-centred. It has an average class size of 29. Its running costs are covered by £37,500 per year from the Department of Education in capitation and maintenance grants, a parish contribution of £5,000 and around £4-6,000 raised by its enthusiastic parents. It also receives around £8,000 from a community employment scheme. All this makes it just another, if larger than average, Southern, working-class primary school. The secret of its singular success is in the way Gerry Murphy and his colleagues have made it the huge and central energy source for the entire local community. In doing this, they have won the respect and confidence of educationally disadvantaged people who would not normally look to a school for such leadership.

There is something happening in every corner of St Joseph's. Last week local TD and Minister, Dermot Ahern, opened a multimedia room with 20 spanking new computers. It has been designated by the INTO as a centre of excellence for spreading the word about information technology to surrounding schools, and will be used outside school hours by the local community.

Nearly 10 per cent of its pupils come from a traveller background. On the site are both a travellers pre-school which is so successful that non-traveller parents ask if they can send their children to it; also a health education programme for traveller women, many of them parents.

The home-school community co-ordinator organises both a pre-school breakfast club and after-school homework clubs for children from particularly deprived families. There is a parents' room, where mothers in particular meet and take adult education classes.

Both FAS and the Local Employment Service have offices on the school site. Murphy and his deputy, Marcella O Conluain, believe strongly that in areas like Muirhevnamore, the way to get people to use the social welfare agencies is to integrate them into the community in this way.

To listen to the teachers, one would think this was a school with few problems. Its local business contacts and the fact that in previous years it had up to 850 children - with capitation grants to match - have solved many of the financial headaches which afflict less proactive schools. In the haphazard way the Department of Education often seems to work, another £15,000 appeared last week, delivered by Ahern, to help pay for the new computers.

If there is a problem, says Murphy, it is accommodation. Luckily their numbers have gone down in recent years as an all-Irish stream they started grew so rapidly that it had to be turned into an independent gaelscoil down the road. A second headache is that, like most schools in the Republic, their considerable sporting, musical and artistic successes have been achieved in the face of substandard facilities and uncertain funding arrangements, including reliance on parents' flag days, church gate collections and social nights.

SOME 13 miles up the road, across the Border at Carnagat on the edge of Newry, Co Down, the principal of St Malachy's primary school, Leo Cowan, knows the exact size of his annual budget and he, in agreement with his board of governors, makes all the decisions about how to spend it.

Every year he gets £700,000 from the Northern Ireland Department of Education, of which 84 per cent goes on teachers salaries - paid centrally in the Republic. This leaves around £112,000 to run his 500pupil school, a sum which he admits would make his Southern counterparts "green with envy". The Republic has very few primary schools which look like St Malachy's. It serves a very deprived area, the high unemployment Catholic housing estates at the southern end of the town, and the fact that 50 per cent of its pupils are eligible for free school meals - which are unheard of south of the Border - reflects this.

It is a beautiful school: a well-proportioned, two-storey building, put up 16 years ago but looking much newer, with wide corridors, a large, airy dining-hall and assembly hall, and units of three and four classes with their own toilet facilities and ancillary rooms. It presents an extraordinary vision of neatness, brightness and tranquillity.

Cowan is understandably proud of his school and, like St Joseph's in Dundalk, St Malachy's has a high reputation in the Newry area - for its sports, music and drama achievements as much as for its superb facilities. The school's recent report from a five-strong team of departmental inspectors praised its "calm, purposeful atmosphere, good relationships, well-behaved and interested children and hardworking, conscientious teachers".

But Cowan hinted at the ordeal the school had lived through during this inspection when he noted that "most schools in the Republic would find it an extremely daunting experience to have those inspectors go through the range of things they looked at here".

He is also scathing about the demands put on him and his staff by the constantly changing requirements of the government-dictated national curriculum, pointing to the racks of files he must maintain to meet his statutory duties and keep the inspectors happy. His average class size of 25 is only slightly lower than his Southern counterparts.

The advantages of the North's regional education system are apparent in some of his music and sports equipment. The flutes, trumpets, trombones, oboes and clarinets in the school band, for example, are all leased from the Southern Education and Library Board.

This means, of course, that the school does not need to appeal to the local community in the way Southern schools constantly have to. There is little or no community involvement in St Malachy's. Cowan mentions a group of parents talking about forming a school support group almost as an afterthought.

This reporter took away contrasting impressions of these two schools which are, in many ways, models of all that is best in their respective systems. The Dundalk school, while coping with the usual headaches of accommodation and finance, is clearly a passionate focus for a community's energy, while the Newry school, like so many Northern schools, is a well-ordered haven of peace and discipline.