David Cullinane (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I accept that. I welcome the recent announcement that parents are to receive special training in an effort to crack down on bullying in our schools. I also support the Minister's decision to allocate €40,000 to an anti-bullying project. Any steps taken by the Minister and his Department to deal with this issue will have the full support of my party.

Like the parents' and teachers' organisations, Sinn Féin is very concerned by the prevalence of this problem, especially in our national school system. The INTO recently estimated that up to 40% of nine year old children had been bullied at some stage since starting primary school. Parents are key to solving the problem and will be central to addressing it at both primary and secondary levels. I know the Minister places parenting and the role of parents front and centre in how we address the problem and that is the correct approach.

However, while we welcome the aforementioned initiative, it is important to acknowledge that this issue is a difficult and complex one which requires a multi-pronged approach. The diversity of Irish society now is something we should genuinely celebrate. We are a much more multicultural society. There are children in our classrooms today of varied race, ethnicity, sexual orientation as well as physical and intellectual ability. However, that presents challenges, both to teachers and to schools. It also, as we know, throws up bullying. The Minister is aware that people who are homosexual, for example, often experience much higher levels of bullying. A lot of the new Irish, that is, immigrants to this country, have also experienced bullying, as have members of the Traveller community. We need to look at that because separate programmes might be necessary to deal with these specific forms of bullying.

We must also learn lessons from the past. Let us take the example of various gay rights groups. BelongTo and GLEN were mentioned by previous speakers. They embarked on three nationwide campaigns to tackle homophobia in the education system. Those campaigns actually became a national plan and what underpinned that national plan was a multi-agency approach to dealing with the issue. That is a useful lesson for us in dealing with this issue as we go forward.

It would be remiss of me, while the Minister is here, not to say that the cutbacks in the education system across the board make it much more difficult for us to deal with this problem. I am not going to pretend or claim that cutbacks alone result in bullying in our classrooms. They do not. However, they do make it more difficult for teachers to deal with the issue. Only yesterday, the INTO published figures which showed that 25% of all classes in the city and county of Waterford are so-called "super sized" classes of over 30. Does that present a bigger challenge to those teachers, given the diversity within those classrooms and the issues they have to deal with? Of course it does.