Teachers take no interest in the plight of people who leave their schools unable to read or write, a conference organised by the National Adult Literacy Agency was told yesterday.
The Minister for Education was criticised for failing to attend the conference, and the Vocational Education Committees were also criticised for a poor attendance.
The conference at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin, heard that people from poor backgrounds who grew up illiterate feel that teachers paid them less attention at school than if their families were well off.
A researcher, Ms Ursula Coleman, presenting the results of interviews with 146 adults engaged in literacy studies quoted a woman in her 30s saying that "we were classed as low class at school . . . we were made to feel that the whole time by lay teachers and nuns".
She quoted a man in his 30s as saying: "I got a raw deal going through the sick school system but there is no way it's going to happen to my children."
Said Ms Coleman: "As children, they knew that they were poor and that others were well off, and they felt that the treatment meted out by teachers was often based on the socio-economic status of their families. This was the perception of participants in both urban and rural areas and across the age ranges."
The Minister for Education, Mral Martin, was to have opened the conference but sent a civil servant in his place. His absence generated anger among some participants and the agency's director, Ms Inez Bailey, said this was the second time the Minister had sent a civil servant to represent him.
An adult education organiser in Dublin, Mr Joe Kelly, said the Minister had not appeared because "teachers in general don't have an interest in literacy. This is not his constituency".
Ms Bailey later praised the Minister of State for Education, Mr Willie O'Dea, who, she said, had met the agency four times.
Participants also criticised the low attendance from the Vocational Educational Committees, all of which had been invited to send their chief executive officer.
Ms Coleman noted that the sense of stigma is very strong among people who are illiterate. They dread being labelled "illiterate", a term which in their minds often carries the same moral and emotional overtones as "illegitimate", she said.
Her report quotes one woman as saying: "I would rather have, probably, a diseased skin and come out and let people see it."
The quotations from her report were read by two people who had grown up without being able to read or write - but they read from behind the speakers' platform as they did not wish to be recognised as people who had once been illiterate.
The low number of unemployed people attending literacy schemes is a cause for concern, Ms Coleman said. Almost half the people she interviewed were in paid employment and a significant number of the others were working full-time in the home.
The working prospects of the people in the survey had been very badly damaged by their illiteracy.
"Many found their work dull, repetitive, unfulfilling and physically tiring, and felt that they were sometimes considered as lesser people because of the work they did," she said. "A considerable number of participants pointed out that they had had to turn down promotional opportunities because of either their lack of skill in, or confidence about, reading and writing. They spoke about shame and embarrassment in this regard, together with fear that their employers might find out about their difficulty."
A recent OECD report found that 500,000 Irish adults have severe reading and writing difficulties.