Mr. John Boyle:

Ms McDonald was speaking about vulnerable people and we are really concerned about the staff in this instance. The rate of sick leave for teachers is very low across the public service. As mentioned earlier, they often drag themselves in when there is no way that they should be in. Classrooms can be a great place for the spread of infection, especially in the younger classes with the infants and so on because they are not able to manage it. We did lose those days of cover for what was known as self-certified illness. If a teacher develops a symptom on a Sunday evening and is mandated not to go in to work because of that they cannot be penalised in Covid territory. There is a Covid leave at the moment and that leave is going to have to continue in those cases.

That is the first aspect of it but the difficulty for the school under the current arrangements, which have been in place for the past seven or eight years, is that a school does not get cover for that teacher. Unless this is resolved, there is a lack of joined-up thinking when it comes to Covid because we cannot have a State mandating people to stay at home but refusing to cover for them when they are absent. The effects of that, as I said earlier, would be classes split and we certainly will not countenance that happening.

In addition, when it comes to dealing with the substitution issue, I mentioned the concept of the supply panels earlier and this is something that could easily work in the post-primary sector as well. We have a pilot up and running and if it was expanded and if ten schools in an area around Bantry or Banteer or anywhere else knew there were a couple of teachers available for certain that they could ring and who were happy to do that substitution, it would certainly help to alleviate the pressure.

On the question of buy-in, Irish society has done well since the beginning of March in buying in and people were highly compliant with all those restrictions. There was a clamour at the beginning to close schools, there has been a clamour now for a number of months to get them reopened, but we cannot reopen them without buy-in from all stakeholders. When the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Ms Jacinda Ardern, made a decision that parents would not be congregating on school facilities until this virus was condemned to the dustbin of history in her country, everybody bought into that. People did not go beyond those school gates. This is not something that we as a union would ever have thought we would be asking for, because we really value the input of parents in primary education.

With regard to the teaching force itself, we cannot have teachers, like they used to, coming to school when they are ill. If they are ill, they must stay at home, and in that instance we will get buy-in. It is not in our nature to stay out, but if we are to open schools and keep them open, and I am more worried at this stage about keeping them open, we are going to have to get that buy-in from society generally.

Employers are going to have to give a bit of slack to a parent who is called to a school because his or her child had to self-isolate. We cannot have a situation where an employer refuses to allow the parent to go and collect the child and as a result that child is left in the school with further risk of the spread of infection.

Buy-in is going to have to be across the board. Buy-in also costs money. We hope the Department buys in to those asks about the extra resources in the system.