Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

The list of schools affected is being extracted and will be given to the Deputy presently. It would be impossible to list them all here. It is a genuine case of officials having to go through the IT system to inform us which schools will lose 120 teachers. When the information is complied it will be forwarded to the Deputy.

We examined the possibility in-house of changing the retention schedule. In the current economic climate, however, with the extra numbers attending school in September, it is not possible to do it this year. I would like to have continued the process I started in 2006 of reducing class sizes. The Deputy, however, will accept the economic climate is not good in allowing us to achieve all of what we had set out to do. It still remains a Government commitment, however.

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