An Education
John Walshe
Penguin, €15.99
John Walshe, former education correspondent with the Irish Independent, describes his experience as Ruairi Quinn’s special adviser in this perceptive, revealing and entertaining book.
The 40 months which Walshe spent in the ‘reforming’ education minister’s kitchen cabinet were by turns exhilarating and disheartening, always exhausting and, he assures us on more than one occasion, an awful lot of fun.
We have to take the author’s word on the fun part for, unless you count for a few drinking sessions in Doheny & Nesbitts, this first-hand account of life in the Department of Education is markedly short on laughter.
In fact tears of frustration might describe more aptly the atmosphere in Marlborough Street and in the back rooms of Government buildings as Quinn and his people battled to drag our schools and universities into the 21st century while undertaking the conjuring act of educating our ballooning schoolgoing and third-level population on ever-diminishing funds.
Doubtless Quinn, a veteran politician, had an idea of what he was getting into when he resolved that his work in education would be his legacy. Given the dead weight of vested interests that he and his officials encountered on even the most trivial issue, it’s nothing short
of miraculous that he achieved anything at all during his time of his office and that he succeeded in putting in train so many changes to the Junior Certificate, school waiting lists and so forth.
Brian Cowen famously described the Department of Health as Angola for the number of unexploded landmines secreted within the labyrinthine system, but the Department of Education is akin to Antarctica in the fierce territorialism it engenders.
From the relatively lowly CEO of a small VEC to Enda Kenny’s eagle-eyed advisers, everyone wants a piece of Education and even minor policies cannot be tinkered with without what appears to be an endless number of high level pow-wows and wheeling and dealing with public officials. Officials whose driving interest seems to be protecting their own patch rather than the public interest.
Walshe also portrays sections of Fine Gael as in thrall to the ideological hard right.
When FÁS was being dismantled advisers in the larger coalition party suggested that the training courses should be privatised and clients given vouchers.
The party also refused point blank to discuss a reasonable proposal from Labour that farming assets be used to assess eligibility for third-level grants.
Of course, Walshe’s view of Labour as a restraining force on the Fine Gael agenda is naturally partisan. But his book shines an intriguing light on how the country is run – slowly and laboriously with an enormous reluctance to change, in case you are wondering.