Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

In the life of this Government and the previous one, thankfully the vast bulk of resources have gone into education and particularly into education for the disadvantaged. An enormous number of additional teachers, some 4,500, including 3,000 resource teachers, have been employed in our primary schools. Particularly in this Government we have targeted our measures towards education for the disadvantaged to try to help eliminate areas of disadvantage. In international criteria we hold up extremely well in most aspects of education and in our primary education in particular. There are some areas where we would like to see some improvement and that is what the whole education system is about. This is why we spend the kinds of resources we do. However, we have continually targeted this area. Allocating more money means additional teachers as that is where the whole expenditure is in education. They have been appointed to deal with disadvantage and improve the service.

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