Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

I can neither confirm nor deny that. It is a legal matter. Our guidance is that everybody has to do the best he or she can. There is a personal responsibility and a school responsibility here, and the Department has to support people in that regard. A real change of behaviour is needed, and I do not think we have fully got it yet because many of us are still working from home and staying at home. We used to force ourselves out to work or school if we had a runny nose or a cough. We need to change that behaviour. We have it inside ourselves, I think, that we are mitching off or something if we do that, but that is what we have to change. The real behaviour is the personal change in behaviour not to put oneself forward. Schooling will be different in the approach taken because of all the sanitising, cleaning and so on, but we also need to keep the classroom, the learning experience and the interaction between students. That is hugely valuable. We need to find some way to get that going and keep encouraging it. Within all those parameters, I do not see this as a legal issue primarily but rather as a societal issue. We can enable everybody to come back into learning to the fullest-----