Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

-----can talk about the situation it inherited. The Government knew exactly the situation it was going to inherit because it had full access to all the books in the autumn of 2010. If one checks the record one will see its members said that autumn that things were a lot worse than they were. Now, of course, they are saying there has been a miraculous improvement because they followed their plan. However, the fact is that despite all of that, the Government made commitments and promises knowing full well it could never honour them.

It seems to me, when one examines this decision, that what drove it was not the interests of education but the need to come up with a smoke-and-mirrors way of saying the Government did not touch the pupil-teacher ratio. Somebody dreamt up a clever trick: to go for the ex-quota teachers, because then the Government members could stand up on budget night and get a short victory by saying they did not touch the pupil-teacher ratio. What did the Government do? It cut a service that was established by my colleague Deputy Martin, the leader of Fianna Fáil, based on the Education Act 1998, which provided career guidance counselling to pupils in our schools.

The Minister's statement that this is about filling out CAO forms is totally disingenuous.

See this speech in context