Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)
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I am a little late as a few meetings are coinciding tonight. The Minister is always welcome to the committee, and I congratulate her on the continued good work of her Department. On budget day I was delighted to see €5 million secured by the Minister to provide a pilot scheme for in-school counselling support. I will speak on that for a moment. I was invited recently to Gaelscoil Mhíchíl Cíosóg, Ennis. She visited it herself about 18 months ago. It is an incredible school through trí mheán na Gaeilge. It is on the Galway side of Ennis just as you leave town. Dónal Ó hAiniféin and his team of teachers have excelled over many years. Their latest initiative is an in-school counsellor and play therapist, which the board of management started funding from its own coffers before the Minister's announcement on budget day. She is a qualified psychotherapist too. Her name is Aideen Flynn, and about two weeks ago I was invited to shadow her in the room and watch how a session got under way. It was incredible. They have a post holder who deals with mental health and wellbeing. The school team grasped all of this coming out of the Covid pandemic knowing, as we all do, that it had been particularly tough on kids. They are looking to be one of the pilot schools because they already have a template for this. They have a policy and a post holder. They have someone they are already employing and this year, from September 2022 to June 2023, they hope to see 37 children avail of this support and they reckon they could increase that threefold if they were given some support from the Department. That is my first question. While the Minister probably cannot commit to a specific school, I just wanted to mention that and I am delighted to see her advisers writing down the name of the school. That in itself is a little win today.

The are two other things I want to put to the Minister. For me, it was the highlight of the past 12 months in government to see that school transport scheme announced. We know there were teething problems but let us go back to what the actual scheme was about. It was about making it free for a child to go from home to school and back again each day. It is an incredible scheme that needs refinement and while more again can be done to refine it, the very premise of the scheme was fantastic. I said at the last committee meeting the Minister attended that this is a scheme we should be trying to roll out and improve upon year on year and implement on a wider scale. If you think of any school in the country, a couple of hundred cars each day queue up in the morning to see the child go in the door and then collect them again in the afternoon. When you think of the months of July and August, you can pick any town, city or large village in the country and you can nip from one side to the other very easily because the school traffic is off the road. Your cabinet colleague the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, can talk about metro north and rail passing lines and greening everything but imagine taking 200 or 300 cars from a local community off the road. That would be incredible in itself. Somebody once said that five buses equals one train. That is a scheme I would love to see reactivated. Finally, now that the Department of Education will be in the process of funding and making schoolbooks free at primary level, I ask that the Department officials exercise a little oversight on the publishers. The idea of a revised edition each year does not wash with me. I have seen it many times as a teacher. There might be a stanza taken out of a poem or there might be additional questions put on page 18. That is not a revised edition. That will be very unfair if it happens next year. It will exploit the goodness of the scheme. I ask the Department to have a little bit of oversight in order that the publishers do not start bringing out a tranche of new editions. If a book was good enough in 2018, it is good enough in 2022. We do not need all of these revisions.