Mr. Michael Gillespie:

The Minister decides the curriculum, so all we had a choice in was the development of resources. We had to hope that the development of the resources and the continued input would help. On the AI issue, for example, there is an AI task force agreed as part of the redevelopment. That has to meet straight away. We have to agree on its terms of reference straight away and it must report within a year. AI is changing overnight. We now have European guidelines on it that must be incorporated. The task force, with all the stakeholders, must start to meet and come up with answers to the questions the Irish science teachers are rightly putting, because science is at the forefront of this. This is the first thing that has to happen on AI. We are part of the process and want it to go ahead.

Funding is a problem. We have had massive underinvestment in education in recent of years, and that is why we have such big class sizes, but there has also been underinvestment in infrastructure. Therefore, there needs to be a massive infrastructure investment. One of the things that should have been done was an audit of all classrooms in the country to see what was needed. We do have some greenfield schools that are well able to do nearly everything. They have the infrastructure, including Wi-Fi, to handle most of the work. However, we have schools around the country that are giving out free devices, yet they do not have the infrastructure to handle them. There is a massive funding shortfall in this regard.