Mr. Paul O'Brien:

I thank Deputy Barrett, who has made us all reminisce in terms of our experience going back over the years and how we take for granted how Ireland has invested in education, which we do.

I want to come to Senator Bacik's comment around the levelling off. I believe there are two issues, although I do not have the evidence for that. The first is enrolment. We can get a very big bang initially with enrolment, but as we have been alluding to, it is not necessarily about enrolment, and it is actually around the quality and outcomes in education, rather than just getting children into school.

The second point is that there is a big attack on education in a number of countries at the moment. People have referred to Boko Haram. The words "Boko Haram" mean "No Western education" in Hausa. We are seeing this spreading across the Sahel. The week before last, I was in Burkina Faso, a country that was called Upper Volta when I was at school. It has an Islamic insurgency coming in from two sides, from Niger and from Mali in the north. While I was there, more than 2,000 primary school were closed because of this insurgency and more than 400,000 people were internally displaced. We do not see this in the Irish media at all because it is just a tiny place that nobody really cares about. However, we have Irish Aid money there and we are working in an area that is currently not affected on a programme around inclusive quality education.

I want to pick up on one point. Investment in education is very important and it cannot be something short-term. It is not for two or three years. It has to be something longer-term. We encourage Irish Aid in the investments it has made in the Global Partnership for Education in regard to education and development, and more recently we are really encouraging about Education Cannot Wait, which is on the emergency side. For example, I heard people say recently that they left Syria for the reason that they could not send their children to school.

It was not just because it was dangerous, they could not send their children to school and quickly recognised how they would have a lost generation if they could not get their children into school. That was seemingly part of the reasoning behind people going to Turkey and other places. It was that they could continue the education of their children. While this may seem very doom and gloom in many ways, I am convinced that many parents are convinced, as are we, of the importance of sending their children to school. If given the opportunity, they can also prioritise their daughters going to school. This might take a bit more time in terms of poverty and some of the other issues about which we talked.