As we all have been reminded in the past few days, some 17 per cent of Irish adults are functionally illiterate. This is as meaningless as talking about the average distance between the planets, for illiteracy is not dispersed equally throughout Irish life. It is concentrated almost entirely in a world which most of us know as much about as we do about the urges of the oyster and the secret lusts of lichen.
That world exists in concentrations of futility, stupidity, ignorance, despair and poverty, the very conditions which make the net transfer of money into it as wasteful as pouring fine wine down a drain in order to make the sewers sweeter. Indeed, the very worst thing which you can do for generational indigence is to reward it with large amounts of unearned money, for even the most innumerate of people can work out the simple arithmetic of being paid to stay in bed. What do you do? You stay in bed.
Class analysis
The traditional class analysis of family and social life in Ireland is as much a colonial construction as was Dublin Castle. It declared that there was a capital-owning class which ran the Irish economy to exploit the working class, and which needed reserves of unemployed to keep wages down. Classically in this stereotype, this class educated its sons at Glenstal, Clongowes and Gonzaga, and perpetuated itself by transfers of capital and educational privilege down the generations.
This looked and sounded good, because it satisfied the Marxist requirements which still exist among the Irish left; but it was all rubbish. The 1916 Rising was a lower-middle-class revolution. That class finally seized and held power from 1932 onwards, and has remained in power, with small interludes of governance from the strong farmer-professional class, ever since. The Christian Brothers educated their sons, not the Jesuits. In as much as it was capital owning - which was not much - it was because power gave it access to patronage; but in no sense was it a bourgeoisie.
Now of course, there's as much empathy between the lower middle class and the sub-labouring classes as there is between Palestinian pauper and Jewish settler; but in the peculiar conditions of Irish life, the lower middle class spoke the same tribal language as the lumpenproletariat. The Tricolour was a good rallying point for the working classes, and their lumpen brethren beneath them. It kept them quiet.
So, sadly for the left in Ireland, socialism made limited inroads into the poor, working-class bantustans which the State - or rather, the lower middle classes who ran it - constructed at a congenially sanitary distance from where the lower middle classes themselves dwelt. Did any other state in Europe build estates which so expressed an official, if subconscious, loathing for the unfortunate people who would live in them - places such as Darndale, Kilbarrack and Tallaght, without pubs or shops or proper recreational facilities of any kind?
What was done to the lumpenproletariat of Ireland was class warfare by another name. Sink-zones were created, and that class shovelled into them and left there. This is the class most acutely prone to drug addiction, family abuse, alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, violence. It is the class which perpetuates itself with unwitting, and largely uncalculating enthusiasm, and which transmits fecklessness, illiteracy and personal underachievement down the generations with almost genetic majesty.
Educational wing
Lower-middle-class fear of the great unwashed created those estates; it also created the conditions which rewarded its own educational wing, the teaching profession, with the longest breaks from work of any country in Europe. This truly bizarre and dysfunctional way of providing education ensured that illiteracy in these pre-cast bidonvilles, where schools were closed more than they were open, was of Sowetan proportions. But Soweto at least has a ravening thirst for education and improvement: our townships despise education as effeminacy and success as class-betrayal.
How could this be? How could we have allowed education to be compulsorily withdrawn, by State decree, from the most educationally deprived people in Europe for most of the year, with teachers being paid while their classrooms lay idle? Meanwhile, on the streets outside those locked schools, children would learn to accept failure and unconsidered parenthood as an honoured badge of identity. Only a pathological denial among our political classes could have made this travesty possible.
Political will
It will take vision and an act of colossal political will to transform these vile extra-urban underworlds, and the last thing we should be doing is what some commentators over the past few days have been sanctimoniously urging, namely parachuting money into them. That would merely create a greater dependency on the State, and an even deeper belief in the power of the cargo-cult. What is needed is a generation-long project, maybe longer, the biggest in the history of the State.
If it is to work, such a project cannot be executed with a frivolous and hypocritical devotion to appearance and none to substance, as happened with the teaching of Irish. (Indeed, the expenditure of so much school time on Irish when pupils could neither write nor read English probably exacerbated the cultural alienation and economic exclusion of this underclass.) It will probably mean bribing pupils to stay at school. It will mean a larger teaching profession with far smaller classes, far longer terms and far more money. It will mean, in other words, an educational revolution. Which also means that it won't happen, not least because the teaching unions wouldn't lose their summers in the sun.