Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this important debate. It is quite remarkable that, since the Government came to power, there have been more Private Members' debates in the House about the area of education than any other Department area. I stand to be corrected on that but, from my recollection, it has been an ongoing battle.

This is amazing when the Government has placed so much stock in the desire to get people back to work. In much of the verbiage that goes on around those statements, we hear on an ongoing basis of the importance of education and we hear of the importance of cherishing all children of the State equally. Yet again, however, the Government has shown its blatant disregard and its lack of understanding for the needs of vulnerable children in society and, in particular, those with special needs. It is beyond me how the Minister for Education and Skills could come into the House last week and, with a serious face, try to tell us that a cut was not a cut, that somehow the same top level budget should remain in place and that some agency should be tasked with making loaves and fishes of the allocation, while somehow believing this would be acceptable to the people and that it would represent Labour's core values and principles.

At least the Labour Party chairman, whatever the Minister of State might think of him, had the good grace today to take it upon himself to hand back that seal of office and resign from the Labour Party. At least he is committed to the core principles. They should not just be the core principles of the Labour Party, however, they should be the core principles of any Government that comes to rule this country - to have as its absolute basis a desire to ensure that children get an appropriate and adequate education and, most particularly, children who have special needs and who need that extra support.

When the Minister tried to explain this to us, my colleague, Deputy Charlie McConalogue, made it very clear that if this was associated with pensioners and there was, for example, an increase in the cohort of pensioners and the same top level budget was retained, we know what would happen, namely, everybody would have to take a cut in their weekly payment. Would that not have been considered a cut by this Government? The communications on this issue were appalling.

This motion was tabled because the parents of the children concerned fought tooth and nail over the past couple of days. I salute them, I congratulate them and I say "Job well done". We then had a run of backbenchers from the Labour Party tripping themselves up running out of Government Buildings. They ran across the glass corridor so that it nearly collapsed once the announcement was made, and they ran out into the beaming sunshine to tell the people that they believed in them once more and they believed that children needed to be educated. It took them a long time to figure out this was what was required. Were it not for people power, were it not for the parents of those children, those cuts would not have been reversed.

To try to grab victory from the jaws of defeat will be seen as nothing other than cynical. If this Government is good at anything, it is certainly good at the spin machine. However, I believe it has been caught out on this one. It is very clear the Government did not have at its core the desire to protect the needs of children who have that special requirement.

The cohort of children who need SNAs has increased by 10% and the Government does not propose to increase the number of people who will participate to assist those children. This will create an intolerable burden not just on the teaching staff, but on the other children in the mainstream classes. Whether the Government thinks that is an acceptable model of education, I do not believe the people do so. This is part of a long line. We had it with the Minister in advance of the last election - buying that election, from his perspective.

He won votes on the back of it. The minute he came into office he ignored the pledge and increased the registration fee.

The SUSI debacle, the methodology of distributing the grants to third-level students, is an unmitigated disaster. Today there are students who have finished their exams and still have not received their grant payments. They are still pending because there is a disagreement between SUSI and the Department of Education and Skills over how they define the estrangement of children from the family structure. Can somebody at ministerial level make a call on this and resolve the matter immediately?

We then had the cuts to guidance councillors. That was the most cynical of all because it targeted support for the most vulnerable children in our society. There is no proposal to reverse that because those children come, in the main, from dysfunctional backgrounds. In many cases their parents do not care. They are not organised to the same extent as the parents of the children who required the education provision the Government has reversed. That is the most appalling thing. People power managed to get the Minister to reverse this appalling cut, but because there is no people power behind the children who need guidance councillors the Minister turned a blind eye.

The Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, knows there has been an increase in the number of students who have committed suicide in the past 12 months. I am not going to try to make a political point and say that is entirely as a result of the cuts to the guidance councillors the Government perpetrated on the student population, but it is a contributing factor. The Minister for Education and Skills should be ashamed for not recognising that and reversing that cut. He does not recognise the impact it has on children from very difficult backgrounds. They come from dysfunctional homes and they need support and assistance, but they are not getting it. It is highly unlikely, based on the rubbish we have heard from the Government over the last number of days, that they will have any chance in the future to have that addressed.

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