Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

I am about to go there. The allowances for teachers date back several decades. Responsibility allowances and qualifications allowances were introduced in 1920. Gaeltacht and teaching through Irish allowances were introduced in 1922 following Independence to attract teachers to schools in the Gaeltacht and to those where instruction was given through the medium of Irish. The children's allowance, which is applicable although it has not been for new entrants for a long time, was introduced in 1926. Teachers in each sector had separate salary scales and though the scales were relative to each other, the salaries of teachers in secondary schools were highest, those of vocational teachers were second and those of primary teachers were lowest, approximately 9% lower than those of secondary teachers.

Moving on to the findings of the Ryan tribunal in 1968, parity in regard to basic salary of all teachers was introduced then, following the report of the teachers' salaries tribunal. A new salary structure was introduced following its recommendations, including a common basic incremental salary scale and common qualifications allowances and allowances for posts of responsibility. That is the main part of the history. The tradition of the separate payments for qualifications and for posts of responsibility and principalships all date back to that time.

The other big allowance we have talked about in detail involving a cost of the €118 million is the supervision and substitution allowance which dates back to 2000 to 2002 and the dispute then. I can talk the Deputy through the various changes there have been since then in those allowances but in terms of the history lesson-----