Mary Coughlan (Donegal South West, Fianna Fail)

Sorry, question No. 8 has been put in front of me. I could nearly tell the House of the top of my head about the great time I had at the conferences.

I used the invitation to speak at the Easter conferences of INTO and TUI as an opportunity to set the financial and economic context governing the provision of resources to schools and colleges as well as looking at a number of challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. I covered a number of common issues that were relevant to both unions and issues of specific relevance in the sectors in which each union has members.

I acknowledged that some of the decisions the Government had to make created anxiety and difficulties for their members and that teachers, through their frontline interaction with the community in which they work, gain a very real understanding of the pressure that parents and families are experiencing at this time and the impact of unemployment.

I explained that in Government we are undertaking a hugely challenging task in righting Ireland's course to ultimately provide jobs, opportunity and a future for the pupils and students in their classrooms. In the process, however, we have had to take some difficult and unpopular decisions to deal with the fall in tax revenue and to stabilise the public finances. In that context I explained the need to make a further €3 billion of adjustments in the next budget including a further reduction in current expenditure on public services. Despite all the hard choices of the past year we would still have to go further in laying the path to recovery and this means there will be less money available to public services in the medium term. The challenge in delivering public services is how to achieve more with less and deliver a quality and responsive education system to meet our economic and social objectives in these difficult times.

I acknowledged at both conferences the difficult period we are going through in terms of industrial relations and that the measures taken by the Government had impacted on the living standards of their members and other public servants. I stated that I wished it were otherwise and that no Government would want to take the measures we have had to take if they could be avoided.

I welcomed the agreement framed following discussions under the auspices of the LRC and made clear the Government's view that it represented a reasonable basis to move forward and accepted that the unions must conduct and conclude their own internal processes on the agreement.

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