Mr. John Boyle:

I thank the Deputy for affirming the great work done by our members and all workers in schools.

The improvements, since we submitted our submission a month ago, were things we have sought since last May. We now have sector-specific supports in every HSE area, particularly for principal teachers or principals who made all of the phone calls over their weekends when we sent in our submission.

We have weekly meetings with representatives of the National Public Health Emergency Team, NPHET, and the Department of Education. Yesterday, we received a weekly report from NPHET so we can now compare reports. Most important, we demanded a mid-term review. We wanted a report by the end of September but got it yesterday. It is a very full document by NPHET and the office of the clinical director for health protection. The report contains quite a lot of recommendations and I think it is public since yesterday. Most of the recommendations emanated from the discourse that we had when we had proper weekly engagement with all of the stakeholders and medical people. That has all been welcome. At the beginning of my statement today, I identified a few issues regarding the weekends. Last Monday, we were just three weeks back after the mid-term break but last weekend there were still a considerable number of principal teachers who had to put in long hours. The previous weekend I, myself, was in the firing line because one particular school had 16 staff absent due to self-isolating because of a couple of cases in the school, which was the decision taken by the HSE. We floundered around for the weekend to find substitutes to support the board of management and its teachers. That should not happen at the weekend so it would be great if the substitution service was available at the weekend.

I am particularly interested, as I am sure many members are, in the issue along the Border counties where, unfortunately, including in my own county of Donegal, the numbers have not reduced as quickly. Many children travel from the North of Ireland to attend school in County Donegal but there is no joined-up thinking between the health services on both sides of the Border. As members already know, when it comes to schooling it is the principals who are left in a situation where they cannot do contact tracing within the different sectors because they are not joined up and then the principals have the difficulty of deciding whether children should come to school so there is a lot to be done yet.