SHAMEFUL NEGLECT OF
I'm sitting in a small room in the semi-derelict upper storey of an old house. I am one of a group of parents which has gathered to hear when and how the upper storey will be refurbished. The problem is pressing because the sixth form has no classroom to go into in September.
There is plenty of space in the gracious rooms of the old house, but they need work. The moon winks in through chinks in the boarded-up windows. I never go up to the upper storey of my son's school without feeling the cast of The Plough and the Stars is about to enter.
The news is bad: There is no money. The school is just seven years old and it sings with happiness. It is a gaelscoil with an emphasis on cultural diversity, so that, while Nigerian and Pakistani children speak Irish in the yard, what we can learn from their culture is stressed as much.
But the mood of the meeting is turning desperate. Could we borrow the money and fund-raise for the repayments? Could we use our SSIA accounts as collateral?
It is estimated the building will cost €500,000. There are only 100 families in the school. So far, fundraising has brought in about €15,000 a year. We are forced to catch a grip.
The annual voluntary contribution is €70 per child and it is currently paid for about two-thirds of the children.
The money is needed for basic expenses. The parents pay for every extra, for the swimming teacher and the dancing teacher, for buses to the swimming pool and the hall for dancing.
Both subjects are on the curriculum but even the schools which have halls often must often use them as classrooms – as the Department of Education suggests – and no primary school has a swimming pool.
The penny is slowly dropping with this new parent that primary education is not funded in this country.
Suddenly, the play is not so much The Plough and the Stars as an unknown work from O'Casey's dodgey symbolist period.
The old house, with its semi-derelict upper storey, symbolises the State, and its abandonment of the dream of a Republic of equals.
Hang on, it's not a play, it's a documentary from O'Casey's unknown career as a film-maker. Because Cullenswood House in Ranelagh is actually the house in which Patrick Pearse founded the first bilingual school in Ireland in 1908. Michael Collins had his office in the house during the War of Independence.
The turning point of the documentary, the abandonment of the dream, happens when Pearse's sister, Margaret, gives the house to the State in 1960.
What does the State do? Allows it to be vandalised. Then plans to sell it to a developer. By the time a voluntary group has got together to save it in the late 1980s, its fireplaces are gone, its roof is going.
That this happened is to our shame as a people, says the then Minister of State for the Gaeltacht, Eamon Ó Cuív, at the reopening of the ground floor in 1997. The work should continue until the house is like it originally was.
Nothing has been done since.
The sixth form ended up this September in a room rented from the Seventh Day Adventists in Ranelagh. Planning permission is being sought to put a rented prefab on top of the one which is already in the yard.
This is the State we're in. A State where the promise of a class size of 20 for the under-nines by 2007 was made under the Programme for Government, and officially broken this week by Minister Hanafin, who described it as a noble aspiration.
Where one school's entire capitation grant last year just about covered its insurance.
Where a Department of Education survey last week found that the vast majority of people were broadly impressed with the education system, and more than 60 per cent would not pay more tax to support it.
I am sitting in the meeting in the derelict upper storey of the house in which Pearse founded the first bilingual school in Ireland, thinking it isn't a State I want to live in anymore.