Ms Bernie McNally:

I hear the Deputy's concern about casualisation and we have looked at the issue. We found a lot of data to counter some of what one hears in the media. There have been suggestions that there is a huge number of post-primary teachers who cannot get full-time hours. We have looked at some data on this and it reveals that the vast majority of teachers in post-primary schools, because they are assisting with other subjects, can get their full-time hours. For example, a teacher might be there to teach English and history. I probably picked two bad subjects by way of example. In any case, they might be teaching two subjects that do not give them full-time hours, but because we have put in other resources for SPHE or for English as an additional language, the school principal can draw the hours from elsewhere to give hours to the teachers.