Bright Irish
April 16th, 1995
A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 16th April 1995.
Your correspondent A J McIlroy (Thursday) seems to think that because a Government supported survey of 18-29 year-olds among the 837,400 Irish citizens resident in this country showed them to have a higher proportion of university degrees than the same age group of British citizens, that this means the Irish are “brighter” than the British.
Mr McIlroy of course is not comparing like with like because a high proportion of the citizens of most Western countries working in other Western countries are there precisely because their university qualifications give them that opportunity. I daresay a survey of British residents in Sweden, say, would show a higher proportion of university graduates than among the Swedish population, but this says nothing about the relative “brightness” of the British and Swedish populations.
Leaving on one side whether the possession of an unspecified degree connotes “brightness”, what can be said definitely, is that nobody can take seriously the Department for Education’s everlasting claim to be short of funds when it spends money on such pointless “research”.