Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I am grateful for the opportunity of raising this matter and I expect the Minister of State to be as outraged as I am about this incredible blow to integration. Last Thursday, 40 teachers and four support staff were told the language and integration service they had been providing to over 3,000 people who had arrived in Ireland over the last couple of years would be suspended. As a result the 44 employees have been served with redundancy notices. The Department of Education and Science did not consult with the staff on this and neither has it provided alternative services. Instead, in its rather dishonest press release, it suggested:

Integrate Ireland Language and Training Ltd. has informed the Department of its decision to cease providing direct English language tuition to adult refugees and has requested that the Department mainstream this activity within the education system.

What in fact happened was that the Department of Education and Science told the board that it was not going to fund IILT any more. The board had no option but to fold and give its employees redundancy notices. The press release from the Department continued:

The Irish Vocational Education Authority will be asked to identify how direct English language tuition for adult refugees can continue through the VEC network.

It is going to ask for proposals. It has not got an alternative service in place. It went on to state:

The Department is currently exploring other options to provide for in-service training for English language support teachers in primary and post-primary schools.

That is not in place either, so the existing system, which looked after 907 people in 2006 alone, and 3,000 over the last four years, employing 44 people — with technical information and a website that was being used and appreciated in about nine centres throughout the country — is closed down, with no notice to staff and without an alternative service being put in place. The former Minister for Education and Science, Deputy Mary Hanafin, had suggested that since the OPW had sold the property in which IILT's headquarters was located, it was to move to a school. The original headquarters had been at the veterinary college in Ballsbridge which was sold to private developers, as one might expect from the Government. The then Minister announced in 2007 that IILT would be moving to Greendale comprehensive school. In February 2008 the staff had been invited to look at the new headquarters. Then last Thursday they were called in to be told the service was gone, their jobs were no more and they would get statutory redundancy. That is integration — close down the service before a replacement is put in place. The different materials and aids that IILT had been using so successfully are to be transmitted to the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, and in time they will go somewhere else.

I believe the Minister of State knows very well that the service which was being provided was at five levels, and was not only about language. It was about being in a new country and how to read, as it were, the demands of a new situation. There was a long history to all of this. It would have been very interesting, for example, to provide that in the short term the service could be continued while the mainstreamed alternative was being put in place. However, that is not happening. There is no sign of the mainstreamed alternative. There is neither a better nor equal alternative.

In all of these circumstances, one should bear in mind that the Irish Refugee Council is in support of what I am saying and in terms of expressing horror at this. One should remember whom we are talking about. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees's newly arrived placement refugees will receive in the interim no language or integration training as a result of this disastrous and undemocratic decision last Thursday.

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