Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I wish to share time with Deputy Eamon Gilmore. One of the great glories of Irish education in recent years has been the phenomenon of a great number of graduates and young people interested in starting a career in education. These teachers have brought new life to many of our new schools in expanding areas, along with the existing teachers. What has not been mentioned by any of the Ministers on that side of the House, be they from Fianna Fáil or the Green Party, is that students expecting to graduate next year and the graduates currently in conversion courses will in many cases no longer have jobs to go to. We will be educating the cream of our young people who are willing to take up a life in education. We will educate them and they will once again emigrate to the UK, Australia and New Zealand, where no doubt their skills will be snapped up.

The McKinsey report shows that the biggest differential on whether a child is successful in school is the quality of the teacher. The OECD reports show that we are at the middle level in literacy and reading skills, but we are far below the average in maths. All the teacher training colleges have concentrated in recent years on new and expanded ways of teaching and interesting children in maths and science. However, those teachers will not now be getting the jobs.

In my area, we have an extraordinary number of diverse schools with a very large international population. Almost every school, whether in a wealthy or less well-off area of Dublin West, has an enrolment 30% of which is made up of international children, children with a disability in the mainstream and traveller children. This spells a disaster for a progressive policy of integration that would offer the most marginalised and disadvantaged children a head start in education. Such a head start will last their whole lives, and all the research shows that. I draw the attention of the House to Huntstown national school, a facility in my constituency catering for just under 1,000 pupils. Over the past 20 years, it has pioneered the mainstreaming of international children, children with a disability and Traveller children. The school has been internationally recognised for so doing.

I received a letter from a nine year old girl in fourth class at that school. She stated:

My teacher is Mrs. M. She is a great teacher, but she's not in our school that long and I'm afraid she's going to get sacked. I will be so sad if this happens. Mr. Lenihan came to our school [that is the Minister, Deputy Brian Lenihan] a while ago for a party. Our school is 25 years old and if I had known the people he works for were going to do this, I would have given out to him.

That is how a child puts it. No more than in the case of older people who protested last week, the security of those children is to be put at risk, including the safe, caring world of the school that has been lovingly created for them by the principal, teachers, the board of management and not least by parents' active participation in the school. This is the Government that wanted to offer security to the banks, but it cannot offer security to children or the elderly. It is shameful that Fianna Fáil, which purports to represent the people of no property, has pretensions to make progress in education.

As regards the Green Party, around Hallowe'en in Dublin, children always played a game by knocking on doors and running away. Deputy Paul Gogarty knocked on Fianna Fáil's door and, as far as I can make out, he is still running. I hope he gets to the Hallowe'en party because it is about the price of him. Before the general election, the Greens produced a document called "The 50 Steps to a Better Education".

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