Mr. Seamus Mulconry:

The Senator is passionate about this issue and I am passionate about it as well. Let me explain why. About a year ago I went to a DEIS school. It is in a very poor area and it had been a failing school. Reading and writing were on the floor. The principal went in there and with a dedicated team turned that failing school around. The uniform policy is set by St. Vincent de Paul. What they pay for becomes the uniform. That principal has a box beside her desk and it is full of tracksuits. When she sees a child whose tracksuit has become too frayed she hands him or her a new one. She does it quietly and respectfully.

I spent a morning with the reading and writing team out there. If the members want to see passion, they should go and talk to those people. They have a complete and total passion for the service and improvement of that school and their pupils and a deep respect. That has been my experience of the vast majority of teachers and principals. Teachers are the front-line workers in the fight against poverty. Every child that comes out of a primary school who can read and write has a change in life and every child who does not will probably end up in jail. As a State we pay more to keep a person in a high security prison for a year than we do on his or her entire education up to and including degree level.

The price of education in this country is not set by schools. That is like saying the price of milk is set by small farmers. It is set by the underinvestment of the State in our education system. The State is failing in its constitutional duty to provide free primary education.

The members, as legislators, have a duty to uphold the Constitution and to direct their passion not at school principals and teachers who are trying to do their best in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, but at the Ministers for Education and Skills and Finance who are failing to provide the needed resources.

Teachers are well aware of the pressures families are under. One must remember that because of our demographics, most teachers in the Irish primary school system have young children in education themselves. They see poverty every day. My wife is a teacher and I remember her coming home to me quite upset one evening. One of her pupils had arrived back to her classroom after being missing for a week. He had been missing because he had no shoes, not because he did not have the right colour shoes. He literally had no shoes and she told me she knew he was telling the truth. Teachers are dealing with that.

I am well aware Senator Ruane and others will have received complaints over the years about teachers who were insensitive or schools which put undue pressure on people. No one in the education system would stand over or ever condone that but what one does not hear about are the schools, the principals and the teachers who go the extra mile every day of the week and who often put their hand into their own pocket to see that children are not embarrassed or that they get to go on the school trip. They wring every ounce of funding they can from the Department of Education and Skills to try to provide a high quality education. This ultimately is about the quality of the education we provide to our children and primary school is the place where one learns the core skills that will see one through life. If we get that right at primary school, we are giving people a firm foundation for life. However if we get it wrong, the people will be a burden on the State for the rest of their lives and there will be another generation enduring poverty. I have never been so inspired in my life as when I sat down with that small group of teachers and they outlined to me their strategy to improve reading and learning. It is wonderful to see and that is typical of the vast majority of teachers. As an aside, the Leo Varadkar "sandwiches" are a massive improvement because that is what we had for lunch on that day.