Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and the Minister of State. I acknowledge the unprecedented situation in which they have found themselves in the early months of their tenure and I acknowledge the great work that has been done. I was the deputy chairman of the education and training board, ETB, in Cork for five years and still keep in touch with a number of principals. To be fair, it is universally acknowledged that great efforts have been made to keep our schools open. I was just reading the international news this morning and the number of countries across the world that have been forced to close schools in the past couple of weeks is massive.

I commend the Minister and Minister of State on the job they and the Department have done up to now. I welcome again the comments on the capital funding budget where there has been a massive increase of almost 12%. There are a number of schools in my locality, which is a growing suburban area, where there is a lot of house building. The fact that increased budget is there is extremely welcome for areas such as Carrignavar to the north of Cork, which will hopefully benefit from that in the future. I think the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, was on a call yesterday with a number of principals in Cork on the provision for special needs education. I want to flag that Cork is lagging behind. I welcome her comments about the building of ASD units being mandatory. That is a welcome position to take because Cork has one of the greatest deficits in terms of provision for that sector.

Previous speakers touched on school transport. I plagued Ministers over the summer months on this issue. While I welcome that additional funding, which is due primarily to Covid, going forward a review must take place. Previous Ministers have given that commitment but, unfortunately, they were not in a position to follow that through as they are no longer here but I hope and urge that the review take place. School transport is not fit for purpose and many rural areas in particular suffer because of that. I urge that this be taken into consideration. I wanted to make those two points and welcome any comments.