Mr. Martin Hanevy:

Yes. One of the things we are not permitting is the parent rule, but I will return to that. If a Traveller child or Traveller children are seeking enrolment, we are saying the default position, where there is no oversubscription, is that the school absolutely must enrol them. That is a huge leap forward. There are no appeals to flow from that because the school simply must do it.

On the point about oversubscription, it might not be clear and it might be a fault in our first efforts at drafting, but we are saying that the school must declare up-front for people at the start of the process whether the school is going to be oversubscribed. If the school does not do that, by definition it is not. A school that might think it will be squeezed must say it is going into oversubscription and outline the criteria. It must also state how many places it will fill. In every other school, including the vast majority of the 70% of schools that do not have walking principals, the walk load will be much lighter simply by virtue of the fact that they will be enrolling everyone. First, in 80% of the schools which are not oversubscribed the Traveller child or any other child must be enrolled. Where there is oversubscription the Traveller child does come up against whatever balance is ultimately struck on the parent rule. However, the parent rule and the long waiting list are part of the two policy themes here. One is about special needs children and soft barriers and so forth, and the other is about the person who moves around. That is the Traveller and the migrant mentioned by Deputy Joan Collins, but also the indigenous population or our diaspora, who might be hoping to return to Ireland in a few years. People might be in Australia at present and have a young family out there but they wish to return to the Irish schools. They are also disadvantaged by a certain category of things if they are arriving back and they cannot fulfil the fixture. One of them is potentially the parent rule. It could also be a person in this country who loses his or her job and must move elsewhere in the country.