Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party)
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I thank Ms O'Connor for her opening statement. I have not properly examined the sustainability toolkit for schools. In a busy political life, I need to find a couple of hours to sit down and give it my undivided attention. It is a positive initiative. I acknowledge that the representatives from the Irish Second-Level Students' Union who appeared before the committee were quite positive about the engagement the ISSU had with the Department on the development of climate action and sustainable development as a leaving certificate subject.

I will first outline a broad concern I have, one that goes back to my time in the classroom when I was teaching things related to the green flag programme. It is about the agency of the children who are being taught. You can talk to them about the sustainability of the food they should eat, but they are not packing their own lunchboxes. You can talk to them about sustainability in transport, but they do not make the decisions on how they get to school in the morning. I am talking about primary school here, whereas more agency could be attached to students in secondary school. Emissions from electricity generation could be discussed in the classroom but the students are not the ones making decisions about installing solar panels or X, Y and Z.

How are we going to marry the fact that children will be engaging with this subject in a cross-curricular way but will have very little agency? Much like people in the developing world, children aged under eight are not part of the emissions problem. They are not the ones who have created the issue. That is probably me. A nagging concern I had when I was delivering these programmes was that I was placing a lot of responsibility and guilt on children who did not have the agency to do anything about it and were not the cause of the problem. That is a very broad concern. While we definitely have to this, how do we do it right without misplacing the emphasis?

Ms O'Dea will have a pivotal role if continuing professional development falls on her. While we can get into the teacher training colleges, acknowledging that people can spend 40 years in a classroom, we cannot wait for 40 years to reach the point that this has washed through all teachers. How we engage in the CPD on this and provide the likes of the sustainability toolkit is important but helping people integrate that into their everyday classroom teaching will be a challenge. The Department might speak to how it plans to do that.

I just attended a round-table briefing in the Royal College of Physicians down the street from here. It looked at the dual nexus of climate and education. It was not just about climate education here in Ireland but about how education and climate impact on the developing world in particular. The political declaration made at the Conference of the Parties, COP, last year was mentioned. The Department may not be in a position to respond to my next question today. Why did we not sign up to that political declaration last year and is it planned to address that issue?

The third broad concern I will raise is the idea of having a specific leaving certificate subject that is optional. I do not wish to be pejorative - my wife is a professional performing musician - but it is often the "musos", as they are known, who choose to do music as a leaving certificate subject. They study music and no one need worry about them. I was in the engineering class and we were the people who worked with the lathes.

"It was a case of "Off you go lads, you do the lathes; we are doing music, art, tech graphics or whatever". How do we stop that becoming another siloed area where the musos go over there, the engineers go off to work the lathes and these poor kids, who are probably racked with climate anxiety, go into this classroom over there to sit a leaving certificate subject? How will that communicate and interact?

I am sorry. These are not specific questions but rather, I am just outlining general concerns. To recap, how do we marry the idea of agency and guilt and not overburden our children with it? How will the CPD be done? That is a big challenge. Third, how do we stop the leaving certificate subject becoming a siloed effect, where it is a thing that "those kids there" do?