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Abstract
This paper is based on the recollections of its author of the work of the Investment in Education team from its inauguration in summer 1962 until the completion of its work in early 1965. The author was a research assistant to the team throughout the period of the study and was directly involved in the collection and analysis of the data on which the findings of the report were based. The paper describes the conditions under which the team operated. It adverts to some of the contentious issues which arose out of the data analysis. It explores the evolving roles of the Steering Committee, of senior civil servants in the Department of Education and of the chairman and of individual members of the team during the two-and-a-half-year period. It discusses some of the external influences which impacted on members of the team and explores how the changing economic and cultural life of Ireland in the early 1960s affected their thinking. It touches on the setting up of the Development Branch in the Department of Education in 1966 and its premature disbandment by the Minister Richard Burke in 1973.
Notes on contributor
Áine Hyland is the Emeritus Professor of Education at University College Cork, having been appointed professor in 1993. She was the head of the Education Department from 1993 to 1999 and was the vice-president of the university from 1999 until her retirement in 2006. She was a research assistant with the Investment in Education Team from summer 1962 until autumn 1964 and this paper is based on her recollections of the work of the team during that period.
Notes
1. With Tony Ó Dálaigh and Máire Ní Chionnaith.
2. In September 1963 in response to the growing criticism of the teaching of design, the Minister for Education, Dr Patrick Hillery, appointed a Council of Design to survey, evaluate and advise him on all design activity. Its members included Sybil Connolly, Louis le Brocquy, Maurice McGonigal, Micheal O'Flanagan and Sam Stephenson and it was chaired by Dr Michael ffrench-O'Carroll (see John Turpin, A School of Art in Dublin since the Eighteenth Century, Gill and Macmillan Citation1995, 426–433).
3. I spent six years – from 1953 to 1959 – as a boarder in the Convent of Mercy Secondary School, Ballymahon, Co. Longford.
4. The Report of the Council of Education on the Function and Curriculum of the Primary School had been published in 1954 and the Report on the Curriculum of the Secondary School had been published in 1962, some months before the survey team was appointed.
5. Speech delivered by Minister for Education, Patrick Hillery at the launch of the Steering Committee 31 October 1962.
6. OECD Education, Human Resources and Development in Argentina, initiated in 1965 and published in 1967; and OECD The Mediterranean Regional Project: Greece, Paris 1965.
7. Bill Hyland ‘Reflections on Funerals’ written before his death in 1996. In this paper, Bill set down his funeral wishes, in which he stated ‘I wish to make it unmistakably clear that I do not wish to have a religious funeral’.
8. As he had completed three years of undergraduate studies in Maynooth, he was granted an exemption from first year in UCC.
9. A letter dated 11 June 1949 from the Department of the Taoiseach, addressed to William Hyland, Mathematics Department, UCC read: ‘I am directed by the Taoiseach to inform you that you have been recommended by the Civil Service Commissioners, as a result of an open competition held by them, for appointment to the post of Statistician in the Central Statistics Office’.
10. A paper entitled ‘The Irish Plan’ prepared for the OECD following the publication of the report in 1965.
11. As the statistician on the team, these hypotheses were proposed by Bill Hyland.
12. Irish for ‘The Cannon File’ or ‘The Sheehy-Skeffington File’.
13. The Wolfe Tone Society was set up in 1963 to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Theobald Wolfe Tone. Its purpose was to influence cultural and political trends in the country and to use democratic means to weaken the Unionist government of Northern Ireland.
14. For further information about the Tuairim group, see Tomás Finn (Citation2013).
15. The HEO was more interested in scriptwriting (mostly in Irish) for Radio Eireann, than he was in overseeing the collection and analysis of educational statistics.
16. Copies of the blank questionnaires are reproduced in the Appendix to the report, 117–137.
17. Helen Moriarty was one of the staff of the Statistics section. She remained a friend of mine after we both got married (she married Hugh Fahy) and she became the first secretary of the Dalkey School Project in 1974.
18. See in particular Educational Forecasting in Ireland: a Working Paper, submitted by the Irish Study Group for the EIP meeting in Dublin 27–28 May 1963, drafted by Bill Hyland.
19. Appendix IX.D and IX.E in Annexes and Appendices, Investment in Education, ‘Facilities in National Schools and Delays Associated with the Provision of National Schools’, 579–596.
20. The extent of this exercise can be gauged from Appendix XII.B The School Location Analysis – in the Annexes and Appendices to the report, 610–626.
21. Vercingetorix united the Gauls in leading a revolt against Roman forces in 52 BC. A few months later, the Romans besieged and defeated his forces and captured him. He was held prisoner for five years. In 46 BC, as part of Caesar's triumph, Vercingetorix was paraded through the streets of Rome and then executed.
22. As an EO, I was not entitled to be paid overtime for hours worked over and above the normal working day and I had regularly worked 12 hour days during the period of the survey.