Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

I welcome Deputy Gilmore's support for the initiative. We are only eight months into it, which covers the general election and the summer break, so we do not have plans to extend it at this stage. We are trying to get it up and running. The agenda is enormously wide, ranging from the Humanist, Baha'i, The Religious Society of Friends or Quakers, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Lutheran Church and the Moravians to the more traditional groups we have been dealing with. It is a job keeping it together. We can perhaps engage more with Parliament ultimately, but at this stage we are just trying to build it up and fix the agenda. I am structuring it through a secretariat in my Department meeting and dealing with the issues and then trying to put them into a departmental structure where direct engagement will follow. It will ensure the issues are followed up and are not simply dropped. I hope that by next summer we will have a good process in that regard.

Obviously, some of the bigger groups seek more meetings and dialogue. The Deputy mentioned the comments of the Archbishop of Dublin. The archbishop has a huge diocese and huge physical resources in terms of his Catholic priests and his staff. The Minister of State, Deputy Conor Lenihan, has been involved in meetings at the Archbishop's Palace to consider how to proceed with this and examining the pilot scheme for opening up a new system. However, that must be dealt with carefully.

For the other groups, the main issues relate to education. Issues surrounding the registration of marriages and the forms of marriage is another large category, led by the Humanists. However, the large issue is education and how children can be protected and continue their role in society while maintaining their values and at the same time integrating into society. They want to play their part in society and they support the integrated model. However, on the matter of educating their children in the Jewish tradition or any other, they cannot all have their own schools. The cost would be prohibitive. That is a big challenge for the Department of Education and Science at a time when there is quite a large increase in the numbers entering the education system. As Deputies know, in recent years there has been a decline in the numbers attending primary and secondary school. That has now changed dramatically. This year, 15,000 additional children entered primary school and next year it will be 18,000. The increase has not yet hit our secondary schools but it will in a few years. At a time when members of many new religious groups are entering the country, there is pressure on our schools due to the additional pupils. It is a major challenge for us. We are engaging in discussions with all of these groups and trying to keep higher grants for the minority schools, as we always have done as a society, and provide maintenance grants for minority religions. Thus, the Department of Education and Science represents the largest part of the structural dialogue and also faces the biggest challenge.

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