Marie Moloney (Labour)
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As many of the questions I would have raised already have been asked, I will not repeat them. The Department of Education and Skills provides no funding towards school meals, by which I mean breakfast clubs or lunch clubs. The Department of Social Protection provides funding for the food to the tune of 60 cent per pupil for breakfast and €1.40 for lunch. However, the problem is schools are having difficulty in manning and staffing such programmes, which is where much of the expense lies. It appears as though the Department of Education and Skills, while it allows the schools to provide the breakfast and lunch clubs, will put forward no funding towards their cost. Does the Department have proposals to so do in the future because these clubs have proved to be vital, particularly the provision of breakfast for students who may not have had anything eat the previous 12 or 14 hours?

On the question of broadband, I find it difficult to envisage how it ever will be possible to roll out high-speed broadband to all rural schools in Ireland, given that the local school on which I am on the board of management cannot even get broadband to it. It physically is impossible to get it, as the mountains and so on make it a nightmare in that area. Consequently, I believe it will be difficult to achieve and I imagine it would be hard to quantify the amount of money it would cost to get broadband to all national schools. Hopefully, however, there will be some work in the future in this regard.

There is one point I have always found it hard to understand. I note the Minister of State, Deputy English, has left the meeting.