Mr. Kieran Christie:

Therefore, two cohorts of students will have gone through before teachers are fully trained. That was the point we were making.

We think we made a very reasonable request, both ourselves and our colleagues in the Teachers Union of Ireland, TUI, last year, when we proposed to pause it for one year. That is what we asked for - one year. The kinds of problem referred to by my colleagues Mr. Jones, Mr. Gillespie and Mr. Ó Caoimh would have been ironed out in that year because you would have created the space to have a proper audit of labs, for instance, in the science area. The three sciences, the three "big beast" subjects, along with business as well, are in the first tranche of nine subjects. They are the big subjects in terms of numbers and uptake. That year would have meant so much in respect of that.

We are constantly firefighting in schools. I was talking to a science teacher this morning who said that the companies could not source much of the equipment, consumables and so on quickly enough to get them out to schools, even though the funding was in place. It is just not accessible. That is a backlog and just one example of many.