Nowadays, everyone pretends that there are no ideological differences . . . that we all assent to an amiable and generalised centrism.

The bill of goods we've been sold is that we're all in or on our way into a meritocracy, leaving Father Sean Healy, Joe Higgins, Des Geraghty, David Begg, the governer of Mountjoy and the memory of the Labour party to look after the failures. But the place is in fact full of ideologues. Only they've pulled off the trick of making their ideology invisible.

The interests of most of the people of the Republic are systematically and deliberately subsumed to the interests of one category of people, namely the male middle class.

Look at the fee-paying schools. Look at the expensive grind schools. They are incubators of privilege. Yet the cadre who benefit from the privilege have managed to make it seem natural that this is what education in Pearse's independent Ireland is . . . a system enslaved to class, money, sexism and rank snobbery. And run, at the top, by clerics of the Roman Catholic Church in whose interest it is to train the future ruling class. The clerics are products of a hierarchical, all-male formation and that's what they perpetuate, to the point where it seems natural that men are more important than women and that some men are far more important than other men because they went to certain schools.

It is not natural. Other choices might have been made, in Ireland, in education. They might even yet be made. Then again, pigs might fly.

But this is the context in which the needs of special students have recently been discussed . . . and I take my hat off to the Minister for Education, Mary Hanafin, for promoting the discussion, unpopular though it must be with nearly everybody. The situation is that many top schools do their best to exclude special-needs students . . . exclusion is one of the things they're practised at, since many of them exclude the entire female sex, and all of them exclude . . . except for a token handful . . .

the poor. I mention special-needs students because the minister answered questions in the Dail this week on what is being done to them.

The smart schools don't want challenged students. They're too much trouble. What's more they make a school's results . . . which are all that matters, it seems, to the Irish punter . . . look less impressive, and that makes it harder to attract successful students and money. It is left to a few honourable schools to extend a welcome to such students, but once an honourable school is known to do that, it is overwhelmed by special-needs students.

And what do Irish parents do in the face of this injustice? Well, nothing, though every exclusion can be appealed under Section 29 of the Education Act and the minister wants parents to appeal.

But she knows that parents are not the people to whom one would look to change a country's educational practice. As long as there is privilege and advantage around, what parents want is to get their hands on it for their kids.

For their sons, anyway, in Ireland: shame about the daughters.

She said in her reply to Jan O'Sullivan, Labour spokesperson on education, that: "It is the case that parents are choosing to send their children to the school with the good name and good record. I have some anecdotal evidence in my area of where some parents are paying to send their child of average or good academic ability to a fee-paying school while choosing to send their child with a learning difficulty to a different but non-feepaying school. Those are the kind of choices for which it is very difficult to legislate or create regulations."

Jan O'Sullivan made the point that difficult and all as it may be, our taxes are funding schools which are evading their clear responsibilities. And "the schools will not change their ways, " she said, "unless they are forced to do so by either regulation or legislation."

But if neither the parents nor the schools are going to do anything about it, who is going to do something about it? Well, that's what governments are for.

And this brings us back to ideology. Nobody in Fianna Fail will be insulted if I say that their position on many things is to establish what position will get them elected. In Dublin and the huge neo-Dublin that stretches out from it, this translates as placating the middle class.

But there are moralists in Fianna Fail, too, and perhaps Mary Hanafin is one of them.

What's more, the government has legal as well as moral obligations to special-needs students. There's just a chance that on this issue, she'll lean on the schools that are too grand for the slower student. But if she leans on them about one issue, maybef Ah, no. It could never happen.