It is one of the great ironies of our time: the handful of free schools which did most to found and shape the State, St Joseph's in Fairview, Synge Street and O'Connell's School Richmond Street, now have over a thousand unfilled places. writes Kevin Myers.
They are unwanted as the economic miracle they helped create makes rival fee-paying schools far more attractive.
And an entire class - the upwardly aspirational, Catholic lower middle-class, which once sent its sons to the Christian Brothers - has, like its Protestant equivalent before it, almost vanished; as too have the Brothers themselves.
For Ireland is now the most class-ridden country in Europe, and getting more so as the society divides between those who have prospered in the past 15 years and those who haven't.
We have created a new apartheid, almost as rigorously as South Africa, but far more effectual, because its application is quite informal, and even apparently consensual. Moreover, the State actively assists in the maintenance of this apartheid by paying the salaries of the staff of the fee-paying schools which have established a stranglehold over places in our universities. The middle classes are thus spared the true cost of the privileged education for their children.
They knew about this kind of thing well enough in South Africa, where the white suburb of Sandton in Johannesburg epitomised all that was evil about apartheid. Dublin has a similar area, the Sandymount/Sandyford/Sandycove/Rathfarnham quadrilateral, which contains most of Ireland privileged schools. Sandyfarnham has become one of greatest bastions of class privilege and exclusion in all of Europe.
Were it not so inexcusable in its consequences, it would almost be risible: the working classes paying taxes so that the State can fund the employment of teachers in the middle-class schools from which they themselves are effectively barred. Then, of course, the middle-class students proceed to a free education on a university campus where working-class accents are as about as common as black puddings at a vegetarian bar-mitzvah.
Of course, the word "barred" is not strictly accurate. Nobody "bars" working-class children from "middle-class" schools; but those schools are fee-paying, and that is in itself a bar for the poor. Equally, no-one "bars" working-class students from places at university, but that is unnecessary: the informal bars that have been placed en route usually suffice. So the working classes are paying for a middle-class educational system which erects financial barriers at an early stage, effectively preventing lower-class access; and once the working-classes are out of the race, it abandons the financial barriers altogether.
To be sure, the working classes informally consent to this structural injustice: they vote for the parties which enforce it; and moreover, heaven help the girl from Darndale or Coolock wearing a Holy Child blazer. Yet society shouldn't allow the group stupidity of the least educated classes in the European Union to dictate educational policy. But it can do so, of course, because we have a middle class which deludes itself with its bogus notions of liberalism and egalitarianism, meanwhile ferociously protecting its own class privileges.
It was no surprise that the Minister for Education who quite scandalously introduced free university education was a Labour TD for Sandyfarnham. Ah, how Niamh Bhreathnach's constituents must have blinked back tears of joy when she abolished college fees: this meant another annual holiday, or a third family car in which little Emily or Conor or Lucinda could drive to Belfield, while they could preen themselves on the social justice involved - that free third-level education meant more working-class children in university.
This was a lie, of course, for the children of the working classes were long since flat on their faces watching daytime television in Darndalkin. But at least the uneducated proles won't be provoked by the pictures of middle-class children performing their tearful frolics and group hugs on the steps of schools in Sandyfarnham after the Leaving Cert results; for in Darndalkin, they read British tabloid newspapers and celebrity magazines and they watch Sky television news. They live in a world as remote from Sandyfarnham as old Soweto was from Sandton.
Their world is now a violent world, and growing more dangerous by the day.
The gangland killings of Dublin are confined to Darndalkin, where most people leave school before their Leaving Cert, to embark upon a lifelong career of functional illiteracy, low achievement, and very possibly crime.
And crime is the key. The larger the criminal under-class we create, the more we'll find ourselves living in terror of it, and the more police we'll need, both public and private. We're in the process of creating a Rottweiler-owning, alarm-ringed community in Sandyfarnham, just like Sandton, with its high, razor-wire fences around neurotic residents who start awake at every twig snapping.
Simply, the society we're creating is unsustainable. But there's no point in appealing to Sandyfarnham's sense of justice, for that lies arid and untended, having been long neglected with the smug self-regard which is Sandyfarnham's defining characteristic.
So let us indulge our appetite for the selfish - but now for the sustainably selfish, which translates as that Tory virtue, enlightened self-interest. This means that Sandyfarnham pays the full economic price of privileged education. It means that teacher-pupil ratios in Darndalkin are dramatically increased. It means changing the ethos with inventive incentives - such as generous bursaries to the entire households of promising pupils in Darndalkin's primary schools, so that every family member visibly benefits from an individual's academic prowess.
But of course, in a society where short-termism is a pathological condition, it also means it won't happen.