With Des O'Malley resurrected and Willie Delaney re-interred, the arms crisis displaced industrial schools in the media this week. RTE's epic hagiography of O'Malley opened on Sunday night with shots of its hero attending a rugby match. The following night, Donald Taylor Black's illuminating documentary on Clongowes Wood college accurately depicted rugby as an intense bonding ritual for privileged young men. It was impossible not to wonder what kind of society could tolerate the gargantuan gap between a Clongowes Wood and a Letterfrack.
Think about it . . . Clongowes Wood and Letterfrack. Polar opposites: one at the perimeter of the Pale and the other in deepest Connacht; one for training "leaders" and the other for "training" the unfortunate; one for "building character" and the other for demolishing it; one for the wealthy and one for the poor; one for playing rugby and one for using kids as rugby balls; both run by Catholic clerics. Talk about being taught your place in life! In a country that spouted guff about cherishing all its children equally, the gap is not mere hypocrisy. It's way beyond that. Worse than that - like the arms crisis, it hasn't gone away, you know.
Sure, Clongowes continues to prosper and Letterfrack is closed. It's tempting to think Ireland has become more humane, and it's true that many of the physical abuses of the past have largely been eliminated. But talk to teachers who work in schools in poor areas, and they'll leave you in no doubt that what passes for an education system continues to produce ghettos of alarming deprivation. In between the elite, fee-paying, rugby-playing schools and the ghettoised ones, the majority of kids (and nowadays their teachers, too) jostle to carve out a place in life.
There was a minute or two in Taylor Black's documentary when a Jesuit showed us a gallery of Clongowes luminaries: John Redmond, James Joyce, Oliver St John Gogarty, John Charles McQuaid, Michael Smurfit and John Bruton. Fair enough, it's reasonable for a school, wealthy or poor, to take pride in its more illustrious past pupils. A lay teacher followed up by adding, albeit with a dubiously concocted verb, that the school attempts "to consciencise" its pupils by making them aware of their privileged status.
All right, this can be considered morally defensible meliorism, even if it's really little more than reheated noblesse oblige. Yet if the elite schools teach that privilege entails responsibility, how did it come to pass that Letterfrack and the other child gulags were tolerated? It would be outrageous and disingenuous to blame expensive boarding schools for the gulag system (the roots of the problem are much more entangled than that), but if a major part of your project is producing society's leaders, then some answers from the best positioned are required.
How were we led to such gross inequalities? It's true that family is generally stronger than school in ideological formation, but none the less it was clear from the Clongowes documentary that a primary allegiance fostered by elite schools is towards their own members. How better to do that than to use rugby? Nothing new in the notion of an old boys club, of course (and all groups - doubtless even the unfortunate inmates of industrial schools - have their bonding rituals). But as an example of class solidarity, Irish schools' rugby could show the Irish trade union movement how to do it. Skilled at reproducing itself through fostering strong internal loyalties - cheering practice was a sight to behold - the group dynamics of the Clongowes kids appeared to bestow them with an unashamedly tribal confidence and conviction in themselves. It was an Irish haka in Kildare.
Anyway, as a portrait of the use of rugby in the making of a society's civilian officer class, the Clongowes programme was certainly educational. Like its ostensibly rival - though, in truth, complementary - elite schools, there could be no doubting its production of team spirit. Nor should we doubt that the school provides a strong academic education as well as strong internal loyalties. But the capital and cultural resources required for these tasks are in startling contrast to those afforded less privileged children.
Consider even the Leinster Senior Schools Cup for rugby. For talented players it's a dream. It has a long tradition, attracts great interest from schoolboys and old boys alike and is, in some respects, Ireland's version of Britain's boat race. Like the university "colours match", it recalls a pre-democratic era when the organised sport of gentlemen was the sport that counted most. It has a deserved reputation for producing exciting matches, and that alone makes it clearly worth preserving - but even the media coverage it attracts seems disproportionate in a democracy.
If the guff about cherishing all the children of the nation equally is to mean anything, how is it that, say, schoolboy soccer, the most played form of football among schoolboys nowadays, receives nothing like the media attention of schoolboy rugby? Without doubt, "tradition" is part of the answer, and Irish schools' rugby is right to trade on its history. But it is a history of privilege bonded from one generation to the next, and it sits uncomfortably in a state which calls itself a republic. Little wonder that one of its most famous old boys now calls himself "Sir" Anthony O'Reilly. Very democratic that.
What proportion of teachers, for instance, could nowadays afford to send their children boarding at elite schools? Whatever percentage it is, it's got to be declining by the year. This certainly tells us much about the way in which educators are increasingly regarded within the education system. In turn, that has got to strike the more aware second-level students (who are told to value education for its own sake) as, at least, peculiar. So, we get a system which, at its most privileged end, cannot but discourage students from becoming teachers. That's certainly an unusual homage to education.
Back at the Des O'Malley hagiography, which inconveniently for its hero and its makers had to deal with the recent revelations about the 1970s arms crisis, greater questions required answering. Ultimately, people's opinions on the goings on of the time will be ideological. Protect the state or act on its rhetoric? That is not a morally simple call. But on whichever side you fall, the result is that the 26-county state effectively became the nation and the Northern conflict was overwhelmingly confined within the Northern state.
Now that nation states, especially small ones, are sovereign in fewer affairs than they were even 30 years ago, the debate, while it remains historically fascinating, is less acute. It's still a question of loyalties - romantic and pragmatic - but the inculcation of such loyalties through education and the media, with all sides using censorship and propaganda, has not been hugely dissimilar to the process of the inculcation of loyalties witnessed in Taylor Black's documentary.
What strikes you are the ways in which both elite and public opinion are formed. In the early summer of 31 years ago, as the arms crisis became public and 13-year-old Willie Delaney was privately laid to rest, this state analysed one to death and was unquestioning of the other. Now that both have been eerily Lazarus-ised (well, if they can coin peculiar verbs in Clongowes Wood . . .) we can appreciate how the powerful and the powerless existed side by side.
But that was then. The task is to see it now and to recognise that, in world terms, Ireland is, at least financially, an elite country - a Clongowes Wood in a wasteland of global Letterfracks with rampant illiteracy, rampant abuses and rampant exploitation of child labour.
Then again, if educational inequality at home doesn't shame us, it's unlikely that educational inequality abroad will count for much. However, not to consider the question is to limit our educational perspective. If it's true that the British empire was forged and maintained on the playing fields of its elite schools, what of our own which have been cast in their image? Without the military might and resources for geographical empire building, we appear to have concentrated on colonising native minds instead. Clongowes Wood and the other elite schools serve their pupils, patrons and owners very well indeed. It's just that "leadership" guff which needs to be tackled with Keith Wood ferocity. From what moral authority does that emanate? The morality of money?