Mr. Paul Byrne:

I will start with the question about teachers being on fewer than 18 hours. One aspect is job-sharing itself, where two teachers will be offered 11 hours each. Second, if a combination of subjects is advertised, for example, Irish and English or Irish and history, but no one applies for it, it may be necessary due to the shortage of teachers to advertise two shorter-hour jobs in order to fill the positions. It must be remembered that it is necessary to put a qualified teacher in the subject area in front of classes. That said, it is in our interest to bring teachers from, say, 16 hours up to as close to 22 hours as possible, and few, if any, finish up without the full 22 hours for many weeks of the year.

Sometimes the allocation from the Department is 0.5 of a teacher, which equates to 11 hours. Therefore, there is no conscious effort to keep teachers on short hours. We are trying to do our best to bring them as close as possible to 22 hours. When a contract of indefinite duration becomes available, if a teacher is on 18 hours, he or she is automatically brought up to 22. If he or she is on 12 hours or above, he or she will be brought up to 18.

To respond to Deputy Catherine Martin's question about timetabling and job sharing arrangements, realistically the timetable serves students and the school first. When the timetable has been devised, what happens is that if one can make a change to accommodate a teacher, one will make it, but the priority is to look after the students first.

On fewer teachers coming through the system, while schools have advertised for qualified teachers, they cannot recruit them. They then employ young graduates who teach as unqualified teachers for four days a week. I know from speaking to these teachers that the reason they have not proceeded to take the two-year postgraduate diploma in education course is they cannot afford to take it because of the fees charged and the cost of accommodation for two years. Instead, they will teach as unqualified teachers, either in Ireland or abroad, to get the money to obtain their postgraduate qualifications.

Deputy Catherine Martin stated incentivising teachers to teach in certain subject areas would lead to the creation of inequality. We are at crisis point and finding it impossible to recruit Irish teachers. God help the poor gaelscoileanna which cannot find teachers to teach different subjects through Irish. The teaching of the Irish language has to be incentivised and one can do so in a number of ways. The fees for the first year of the postgraduate course could be paid for students to entice them to take it; in the second year they could be employed for up to 12 hours and paid properly. That might get over the problem of their not being able to afford to take the course.

There is no teacher in any school who has not been vetted by An Garda Síochána.