Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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I appreciate the Teaching Council's role in registration but I am sure the witnesses can understand that, from our perspective, the committee is trying to get a particular body of work done and trying to piece everything together. Senator Wall and I were just discussing this. It appears from the witnesses' own figures that there are 119,000 people available to make a contribution towards summer provision. Ms Fox spoke about the extra 3,500 and 116,000 so that is how I got that figure. We hear constantly from parents that this cannot be provided. It is a huge disconnect for us. An OECD report came out this morning on education in Ireland. It refers to extremely good outcomes and underinvestment but also to our teachers' salaries being some of the highest in the OECD. I think they are the sixth highest in the OECD, which includes most of Europe plus the United States, Canada, Israel, Korea and so on. It is a very broad group of countries. We can ask the Department about this but we will not be able to get a sense of what people are doing privately through the Department because it is, of necessity, private so we will struggle with that. Perhaps the teachers' unions might be able to provide us with better information on what number of teachers made themselves available for July provision in schools last year or the year before and what the need is. On the face of it between those two things, it looks like there is a very large number of people available, who are paid comparatively very well, yet we do not have this service for our most vulnerable children. That is our point of frustration, which I think is readily understood.