Speaking in the Dáil in 1966, Minister for Education Donogh O'Malley was forthright in his views. "They drove half the country mad. . .half the people who took them have not been the same again." James Tully of the Labour Party believed they created a realisation of how bad conditions in the country really were, while Tom O'Donnell of Fine Gael talked about how they made people very critical at meetings and able to put their finger on things politicians would like to see covered up.
What was it that roused the Minister for Education to make such an extraordinary statement? Maybe subversive courses in militant Marxism or doctrinaire socialism? Actually no. Mr O'Malley was referring instead to an innocuous night diploma undertaken in the main by manual workers, farmers, housewives and small business owners from across Munster.
For two years these people finished work early in farmyards, shops and kitchens and headed for their local vocational school. They didn't study the usual cattle-breeding, carpentry or crochet, but instead took a full-scale university course. Sitting at under-sized school desks, they were introduced for the first time to such dangerously radical subjects as sociology, economics and social philosophy.
Their course of study was both unique and daring for post-war Ireland. The first lectures began exactly 60 years ago on October 14th, 1946 when the president of UCC, Alfred O'Rahilly, threw open the gates of the college and offered a Diploma in Social Study that would be available to all - including those with no formal educational qualifications. The first students came from the city-based trade union movement, but once the walls of academia had been breached the flood poured in. Soon the demand was such that university lectures were being provided in rural schools and parish halls throughout Munster.
Of course, an educational programme initiated by such a prominent Catholic as O'Rahilly was never going to rock too many boats. In a memorandum on the role of religion in the diploma's curriculum O'Rahilly was unapologetic when stating, that "it was a delusion of 19th-century liberalism that one can be neutral on education". The overwhelming majority of the Irish people were, he believed, against communism or even advanced socialism. "Therefore in our lectures we do not profess a barren and futile neutrality."
Indeed, to a large extent O'Rahilly started the courses to promote Catholic social principals as a bulwark against the post-war advance of communism.
Despite such social control the diploma raised students' consciousness dramatically. Most participants had, due to lack of opportunity, finished their formal education early but this didn't mean they weren't smart. People from Borrisokane to Bantry and Killenaule to Killorglin could now immerse themselves in the theories of Marx and Engels, even if Catholic social ethics would, in the end, always be presented as superior to the communist analysis.
The heyday of the Social Study diploma was reached in the 1970s when the Aula Maxima in UCC could no longer contain the huge conferrals and two ceremonies were required. Afterwards in the UCC quadrangle, many prominent future leaders of Irish society happily coalesced to celebrate their first formal educational qualification.
Certainly, the stated objective of the diploma - to develop a core of educated local leadership, rather than providing an exit visa for students from their communities - was achieved. According to former course organiser Willie McAuliffe, who travelled the highways and byways of Munster for 30 years as the rural face of UCC, "the diploma gave renewed confidence to rural Irish people at a time when there was often so little to be confident about".
The majority of the 10,000 diplomats went on to make a positive contribution to their local communities. They became more vocal and assertive and, to the discomfort of many in power, questioned why, in an independent Ireland, there was so much poverty, under-employment and poor housing - or, indeed, why 50,000 people had to emigrate annually while the rest of Europe enjoyed a post-war boom.
Some decided they could themselves make a difference. Prominent graduates of the course included cabinet ministers Michael Smith and Michael Noonan; Ceann Comhairle Sean Tracey; IFA presidents Donie Cashman and Joe Rea, along with three ministers of State, 15 TDs, 11 senators, and scores of councillors, farm leaders, company chief executives and trade unionists. And most of the students who didn't aspire to lofty office would still have agreed with Donogh O'Malley about one thing - having completed the diploma, they were never quite the same people again.
Today all Irish third-level institutions, including UCC, have extensive outreach programmes. Trawl through the adult and continuing education programme at www.ucc.ie and you will find the Diploma in Social Study sitting modestly between health-psychology and food production. There is nothing to suggest its historic importance as the parent of off-campus third-level education in Ireland.
But if social theory holds good, and it is the second generation with access to education which brings about profound change, then the Diploma in Social Study contributed much groundwork for the late 20th-century transformation of Irish society.