Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am just grateful to the Houses of the Oireachtas for facilitating a Bill like this. It was chosen through the random-selection process as a Private Members' Bill on a Thursday evening and the Minister gave 12 months for it to be assessed, and here we are. It is a great credit to the Oireachtas that a Bill like this can get to this point.

I will start with a point of agreement. All of us agree that it is better that children should access a local school and that no criteria should ever have to be needed to differentiate between children.

However, if I were to ask any of the people here, whether the members, the witnesses or the secretariat, what school their fathers and mothers or grandfathers and grandmothers went to, they would probably feel that was an irrelevant question and would perhaps be slightly insulted by it because I might be perceived as trying to paint a picture of who there are. I understand that this provision in the legislation was included because of the lobbying by the fee-paying sector, which wanted to maintain some sort of royal line of succession within their school communities. It is up to them to undertake that lobbying and for them to answer as to why they wanted to do it. The argument that this approach is one that not many schools adopt does not stand up. To suggest, based on experience, that only about 15 schools are adhering to or enforcing this approach, then that is still 15 schools too many. For people living in the communities around those 15 schools, it is irrelevant to them if they are on the rough side of this discussion.

Everyone should enter the school admissions process as equal citizens in this republic. It should not matter where someone’s father went to school or who he was. It is completely offensive to the equality agenda of a republic for consideration to be given to the school that someone’s father or mother went to, or, indeed, the school that someone’s grandfather or grandmother went to. It is absolutely offensive. How is anybody expected to compete for a place in those circumstances?

I accept that we should not have a situation where young people are competing for places, but how are they supposed to compete for a place or try to access a place on an equal basis, if they are not from the area or the country or if their parents or grandparents did not attend secondary school? What if this were to be the only opportunity that someone’s family has ever had to break out of a cycle of educational disadvantage, attend secondary school and in that way break out of disadvantage? Yet a person in that situation could be disadvantaged in trying to enter that school because his or her father or grandfather did not go to it. It is so patently elitist and wrong that I cannot believe that anyone would try to defend it on any level whatsoever.