Ms Kathleen Moran:

Absolutely. The Acting Chairman mentioned the digital library service. We operate a digital library service to all pre-2022 second level DEIS schools in the country because the 38 schools that have joined this year have not been facilitated to join, unfortunately.

Audiobooks are very popular across our students and there were some 85,000 items borrowed from that library last year by students across the country, so it is a fantastic service. Unfortunately, we were promised additional funding this year to service all of those schools but it has not come through, so it looks like we may have to cut the service as opposed to expanding it, which is very unfortunate. We think it is very important to look at what can be done, what is there that is valuable, and to support it. Unfortunately, we do not seem to be going that way. The committee has supported the expansion of that to become a national service but it is actually going the other way at the moment, and it is going to be cut as we have a significant cut in funding this year.