A major factor in our dramatic economic success - contributing at least an additional 1 per cent to growth each year - has undoubtedly been our educational system, writes Garret FitzGerald.
The particular history of Irish education has happily endowed us, by chance and design, with asystem which at all levels has proved exceptionally well adapted to the needs of modern high-tech industry.
It is, of course, true that our primary education system is underfunded and is still understaffed, as well as suffering from fragmentation due to its confessional character. Nevertheless, it has promoted social cohesion because its strengths have led to its acceptance by all classes, largely inhibiting what might have been the emergence of a disruptive class division within the primary sector.
At second level, an extensive private school system, assisted since 1878 by state capitation grants and later through it paying teacher salaries, has since the late 1960s provided an almost universally free private, as well as public, secondary education system.
Moreover, the State second-level examination system has ensured from the outset a broad education for our secondary pupils, which has turned out to be precisely what modern high-tech industry requires at this level. Happily we did not follow the example of England - as Northern Ireland did some 40 years ago - in narrowing down senior cycle teaching to an elitist overspecialised curriculum. As a result, we have had a great advantage over England in attracting modern industries.
At third level, two developments during the last century have combined to create a structure that has also proved to be exceptionally well adapted to economic as well as cultural requirements.
The first of these was the establishment in 1909 of the federal National University of Ireland which, because it had to compete from the outset with a long-established and well-endowed Dublin University, developed a commitment to high academic standards, secured through an external examiner system.This has become a feature of all of our modern universities and has not been diluted by the "dumbing down" that has damaged the British university system in recent decades.
A second important development in higher education was the emergence of a binary third-level system as a result of the establishment throughout Ireland of regional institutes of technology, serving the needs of modern industry at technician level. This has provided what might otherwise have been a missing link in our system, and one greatly valued by modern industry.
This unique range of educational elements has been complemented by the strong educational motivation of a people who in the past were forced to prepare half their offspring for emigration. It has also benefited from the fact that, compared to teachers in Britain, the US, and much of the Continent, teachers have been well paid.
The principal challenges that we now face are to rectify resource inadequacies at the primary and pre-primary level; to tackle deficiencies in the second-level assesment system; and to expand the research component in our universities. It seems to me that all these challenges are well understood at Government level and that genuine efforts are being made to address them.
What is less clear is that threats to the present strengths of our system, some of them quite subtle, are equally well understood by Government.
One of these threats derives from pressure to follow Britain's disastrous mistake in "dumbing down" higher education by diluting standards. Pressure in favour of this exists here both within the system itself - due to some competitive factors - but also externally from the political system, which tends to seek increases in the output of higher education while holding back on the resources needed to secure such an outcome.
In the current year this process has even involved making in the middle of the academic year a totally unheralded 10 per cent cut in the resources available to higher education.
It may well be the case that greater co-operation between the university and IT sectors might enable our existing higher education resources to yield a slightly higher return. Such a possibility might be opened up by bringing the institutes of technology out from under bureaucratic control by the Department of Education and placing them within the funding remit of the Higher Education Authority; as this body has just recommended to the OECD team currently starting to review higher education in Ireland.
This HEA submission shows that it is conscious of the danger of what it describes as "mission drift" in this area. It remarks that the creation of the binary system of universities and institutes of technology has been an important element in ensuring the diversity of provision within higher education required to achieve national objectives.
Any dilution of the role of the institutes of technology in supplying the technician requirements of industry or, in the HEA's words, "loss of valuable synergies between the two sectors in areas such as research, teaching and learning, progression and student transfer" would concern the HEA.
It clearly feels that the institutes might do more to encourage many of their students to proceed to degrees in the research-linked universities. The universities might also be more active than they have been in promoting such a progression, but they may have been inhibited in this process because of perceived sensitivities of the ITs.
Unhappily, in the face of populist and local pressures there have recently been some signs of a weakening by Government in its commitment to the binary system. If such a weakening were to affect the actual or perceived high quality of Irish degrees, this could endanger the flow of high-tech industry to this country.
The lesson of recent British experience is before us. For, even in the better universities in Britain there has been considerable "grade inflation" involving an unjustified expansion of the number of first-class honours or other good degrees which has served to weaken business confidence in the system. Irish universities receiving applications for academic posts have had to start to concern themselves with the quality of the PhDs awarded to some British aspirants to Irish posts.
Unfortunately there has been little or no serious debate on these important issues.