Sir, - The states of fear exposed by RTE are now almost a thing of the past and the media, in particular The Irish Times and RTE, deserve much credit for this. Your news item "Handicapped abused, TV programme claims" (The Irish Times, May 4th) on the documentary noted the evidence given that in the Cabra Schools for the Deaf any profoundly deaf past pupils found playing with partially deaf pupils would be "brutally beaten".
Thankfully, the beatings had stopped when I was there in the 1970s. A more subtle and just as degrading method was used: teachers of the partials told their pupils that the profoundly deaf could not speak because they are stupid; while the teachers of the profoundly deaf section told their pupils not to play with the partials as they were too wild.
The Brothers are gone now but segregation is still enforced today. The Department of Education seems to see no contradiction in approving the policy of discouraging integration in the Cabra schools while they encourage it in mainstream schools by allowing a high majority of deaf children to attend. Although research shows that the majority of past pupils are aggrieved that they were not educated through our native sign language, not one of the "qualified" teachers in the Cabra schools has even a sprinkling of it yet. The Cabra schools were conspicuous by their absence at the National Forum of Early Childhood Education.
The presence of the Taoiseach (for the first time) at the open day of the girls' school for the deaf in Cabra some days ago is obviously an attempt by the Department of Education, and the Catholic Institute for the Deaf who run the schools, to shore up this policy. It also endorses State satisfaction with the present form of education in Cabra, a system that is only 25 per cent as efficient as the more progressive forms in other European countries. Recent research shows that over 80 per cent of deaf school-leavers in Ireland have literacy problems and are consequently excluded from any lucrative jobs in the present booming economy.
We now have the Taoiseach, who like 99 per cent of the population is misinformed about deaf education, backing those who short-change and suppress the deaf, while the President, who has family experience of deafness, is pushing for liberation of the deaf through education. - Yours, etc., Brian Crean,
Project Manager, Model School for the Deaf Project, c/o 21 Cypress Park, Dublin 6W.