Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

The fact is that in 2006, during the height of the Celtic tiger, the Minister of the day had €7.888 billion to deal with. Of that, a total of €1.673 billion was spent on primary school salaries. In 2012, the Minister's gross estimate is larger, at more than €8.62 billion, and the Minister has €2 billion for primary school salaries. Therefore, the Minister has a large pot to play with and the decisions the Minister has made are those he chose to make because this is the way he wishes to see the future. The Minister let the cat out of the bag when he issued the document before me on the night of the budget. It states clearly that the long-cherished dream of the Department of Education and Skills to amalgamate small schools has a champion in the Minister, who has no comprehension of the nature of rural society.

It is a conscious ploy to use the excuse of money to fulfil a policy that will destroy a good deal of the fabric of rural Ireland. Before I go into the main issue I wish to outline some of the sneaky cuts. I understand the Minister changed the rule on sharing learning support and resource teachers. The sensible thing to do in order to keep travelling down would be to allow schools to add learning support hours and resource teacher hours together and, perhaps, to have one teacher shared between two schools rather than two teachers shared between four schools. If there were any concerns for the carbon footprint, this represents the most bizarre proposal yet. There has been a change in the general allocation of learning support hours from being based on the number of pupils in a school to being based on the number of teachers, the result of which is to make it harder to keep the teachers and a double whammy effect on learning support hours.

Let us consider the main issue. What is the Minister trying to do? He is trying to hit rural communities, minority religion communities agus na ceantracha Gaeltachta. For some reason, these have been in the Minister's sights. At the same time, when one considers the Minister's budget, it appears the schools that escape the cuts are basically the large, advantaged schools throughout the country. The Minister has preserved and protected these. To ensure they suffer no cuts, the Minister has decided that rural schools should take the hit.

The Minister is entitled to make his policy and we are entitled to oppose it. I put it to the Minister that the anger in the rural communities is such that this will not be forgotten. This is seen by rural communities, for whom I have worked all my adult life, as a direct attack on their viability. The reality is that the Minister is trying to take small schools including two-teacher schools and make them into one-teacher schools. We all know that syndrome. When a school becomes a one-teacher school, the parents chose to send their children to the next two or three-teacher school and the one-teacher school closes. The idea is that amalgamations are voluntary but it is with a gun at one's back and one is told to walk.

If the Minister had consulted with any of us who have worked in rural development we could have told him that when one closes the small school, the community withers and dies. People will tend to live near to where there is a primary school. Therefore, the Minister is trying to force the closure or death of small communities throughout the country. If the Minister does not believe me, I will bring him to certain areas and I will show him what happened following the closure of schools in the 1960s and 1970s. We learned our lesson from that time and we know that where there is no school, there is no community and the community tends to go downhill.

The reason for doing this is rather bizarre. If there is a problem with education - the Minister has considerable problems - it is in the urban areas where the Minister has put in vast resources. As a result of spatial planning policies, the Government favours a scenario whereby everyone is urbanised. Areas of social deprivation then materialise with no value on education in them and where between 10% and 20% of the children get a third level education. If the Minister does not believe me because he comes from Dublin 4, I will show him parts of Dublin with which I am very familiar.

See this speech in context