Mr. Declan Glynn:

It applies to both. I am talking about sections 7 and 8 of the Vocational Education (Amendment) Act 1944. The issue of the dismissal of a teacher in the future is a matter of great magnitude and at a minimum it should be a reserved function of the committee.

However, it is not proposed that it will be a reserved matter but that it will be dealt with by the chief executive officer. Consequently, an individual chief executive officer will have the power to dismiss the staff, inclusive of the teachers, of an education and training board, ETB. Worse than that, that authority of a chief executive officer is transferable to another officer of the VEC. Arguably, therefore, the human resources manager of a VEC could dismiss a teacher. Our point is that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and the provisions currently in the Bill in respect of chief executive officers should also be applied to other members of staff of ETBs.

I refer to the second important aspect of this matter. The TUI is and always has been very supportive of the concept of the provision of education on a regional basis. We were fully supportive of the rationalisation involving the amalgamation of town VECs into their respective counties. Moreover, we support the establishment of ETBs, leading as it does to the rationalisation from 33 to 16 of VEC committees. We believe the ETBs will be well placed, together with the intended SOLAS legislation, and will be at the vanguard of the provision of education in respect of post-primary education, further education and local training. We believe they will spearhead those developments competently. However, the issue is that when the towns were subsumed by their county VECs, the conditions of service of teachers at that time were maintained. There now will be a dispensation whereby teachers may be transferable out of their current areas into a much larger geographic area. For example, a teacher in west County Mayo will henceforth be transferable to north County Sligo. It is reasonable, in the context of such a gargantuan movement and reorganisation of education, to maintain the entitlement to protected limited transfer for serving employees. We also seek assurance from the Government that a situation cannot arise in which a teacher could be redeployed from one ETB to another because vast distances are involved. In County Donegal VEC, one of our members was transferred recently from north-west Donegal to Ballyshannon, the effect of which was €700 worth of diesel payments per month. The man concerned was obliged to undertake a two-and-a-half hour commute each way. While it is bad enough that this might happen to any individual human being, in this case teachers who maintained their employment with an ETB potentially could be transferred over significantly larger distance. Worse still, those who did not maintain their employment with an ETB but who became an employee of a different ETB could be redeployed over vast distances. While we greatly welcome this legislation, this must be highly qualified.

I will raise two final issues. We support the question-----