Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses and the Deputy. It is very welcome that people are positive. I would like to address the challenges around oversubscription. It is critical and it is somewhat related. In a city like Galway, where I am from, we have massive oversubscription and a small number of schools. Part of the difficulty is the patronage system. People's number one choice is a school where the ethos matches their family's ethos. The majority are not going to get in there so they have a second tier of those that may be more accommodating of different beliefs. There are different reasons they might decide to go to a school. It is to do with local schools but it is also to do with ethos. According to CSO figures, of those who are Catholic, only 27% are going to mass yet 90% of the schools are Catholic. It is inevitable that people are not getting the schools that match their family's traditions. Tradition is important to those families as well.

This has to be addressed in the entire conversation about oversubscription. Even where we have oversubscription, the criteria applied to determine who goes to those schools has to be just and fair. Whether a school is oversubscribed or not is kind of irrelevant in that conversation. If a school can just apply anything because it is oversubscribed, where is the equality in that? Justice must not only be done but it must be seen to be done when it comes to the numbers who are actually affected.

In the same way when it comes to equality it is not just that there are not that many people affected. Do people feel like the system is equal for everyone? At the moment they just do not. This is part of what creates that.

I very much agree with a lot of what Deputy Ó Ríordáin has said. This is about elites although I do not think many people intended it to be that way. When I go to doors people ask if I can get them into X school. I am sure a lot of members get the same thing; we cannot get somebody in. In the same way, if it was my child, I would be looking for whatever is out there that I could possibly use. I do not know that it is always to do with tradition. It is to do with what people can do to get their child into a school that is fundamentally compatible with their system of beliefs, whatever that might be. I would like the witnesses to address that point. I think the two things are being conflated, the oversubscription and what we apply.

A lot of people have mentioned the fact that there are new people moving to the area. I know many people who cannot afford to live or get a house in the county where their parents went to school. There are people who travel from county to county as members of the Traveller community do. Quite apart from that, we have lots of new people coming into the country. It is simply not something we can stand over. We cannot say we have an equal Ireland for everyone and still have some of these things applied to the conditions in which people can join schools. I understand that people will use whatever means they can. It is our job to legislate for a better system that is fairer.