Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Yes. We are establishing in law the primacy of the community in respect of the school itself. We are not prescribing the rules and regulations as to how that is to be implemented. We will probably need to provide policy guidelines, directions or statutory instruments to address the issue of ETB members who do not live within their ETBs' areas, but we will certainly not use primary legislation. Anything that we insert in this documentation will be justiciable.

There has been a practice across all of our parties of members of VECs becoming board members of schools at the far end of the areas from which they come. We should not continue that practice. It is fine if an ETB member living in the area wants to be on the school committee. For example, Athlone is one area, yet the River Shannon runs through its middle and County Roscommon comes close to the bridge. There are many other places where communities stretch across distances. Waterford comes to mind, in that its communities stretch into south County Kilkenny.

We will have to think it out for those areas. The old practice, with people on one end of the county finding themselves on the board of a school at the other end of the county, is not something for which we wish to legislate.