Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

During the 20 months the Government has been in office it has consistently sought to avoid responsibility for its own decisions. It has put out a never-ending stream of press releases praising its members as visionaries who are setting everything right. This has been accompanied by a constant effort to diminish, ignore and then deny flat-out the clear evidence of bad decisions and policies. Over recent months, the growing and avoidable crisis which decisions in the health sector are causing has been obvious to everyone. Even within the Cabinet trust has broken down to the extent that the Tánaiste is having the work of a Minister checked independently.

The impact of Government decisions on the education sector has not received anywhere near the same attention but this impact is real and growing all the time. Last year, the Government announced proudly that education had not only been given priority but all front-line education services had been protected. The truth was exactly the opposite. No priority was given to education and cuts were specifically targeted at front-line services. The result is obvious to anyone who cares to look at what is happening at every level of the education system. It is not just that belts are being tightened. Deliberate policy decisions are making the system less fair, more exclusive and building problems which will cause lasting damage if left in place.

No doubt we will hear shortly from Government speakers about how nothing is their fault and everything has been forced on them by a combination of the troika and their predecessors. They should be warned these speeches, always empty, are now causing the Government's support to fall every time they are used in place of seriously addressing very real problems. The public can see through the arguments because it can remember the promises made early last year when every last bit of economic data was available to Fine Gael and Labour. The public can remember the signed pledges and the ringing commitment in the programme for Government that fairness and front-line services in education would be protected. The public hears and understands the repeated statements of the troika that individual spending decisions are fully at the discretion of the Government. These are the Government’s promises. No one forced it to make them and no one forced it to break them.

During the election when the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Quinn, attended a photo opportunity outside Trinity College Dublin and gave his and Labour's solemn commitment not to increase charges at third level, he knew the fiscal situation. The only thing which has changed since then is that the Ministers for Finance and Public Expenditure and Reform say things are actually better than planned. The Minister’s election pledge was no solo run by an over-eager campaign manager. It was reinforced by the Tánaiste himself when he said on 19 February 2011: "Labour is opposed to third level fees by either the front door or back door."

In this debate we will clearly not hear anything new from the Minister about his cynically made and quickly abandoned promise. The nature of that promise, its raison d'être and the manner in which it was carried out was sickening and a new threshold in cynicism. It is well past time for the Minister to acknowledge what has been done. The increases in fees which he has implemented are causing real hardship, especially because of his decision to target cuts on maintenance grants at the same time as increasing fees.

The evidence of a significant increase in student hardship in the past year is overwhelming. The scale is such that the next step will be a fall-off in third level attendance by the most economically marginalised groups.

As we have heard, during the past two months the situation with regard to late payment of grants for those who qualify has become a full crisis. Many thousands of students have not received their reduced payment because of administrative chaos and problems under the direct control of the Minister. The Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, system is failing students and the Government should accept and rectify this. Despite promises given last week by the Tánaiste about students having full access to all they needed in college, we heard last night from students on "The Frontline" that this is not the case. Since this problem emerged students and families from all parts of the country have been pressing for urgent action. However, upon examination not one of the lengthy list of press releases and speeches made by the Minister during this time addresses this crisis.

Deputy Charlie McConalogue persisted with parliamentary questions to get to the bottom of this issue and only subsequently did the full truth come out. At least the relevant Oireachtas committee met staff from SUSI today. It is obvious to all - it has been for some time - that 65 staff is not enough to deal with more than 66,000 applications. This needs urgent attention. The two fee increases implemented under this Government are part of a larger series. Currently, it is the Minister's intention to increase student fees by far more than any of his predecessors. In opposition, the Labour Party promised to cut these fees and during the election it promised never to increase them. Now it is implementing an unprecedented series of five increases. What makes this a great deal worse is that cutting funding for access to third level is accompanied by targeted cuts at schemes to help disadvantaged students in first and second level. The Minister has delivered many speeches in which he has said that he will rescue an under-performing system.

Sometimes the Minister's criticisms of the system are balanced and reasonable but more often they have involved putting the worst possible spin on statistics. Last week he found himself in something of a quandary because he had to release a report showing that school completion had increased significantly to 90% under his predecessors, a vindication of policies during the past decade. At the same time the greatest improvements were seen in the most disadvantaged schools, the under-performance of boys was being addressed and there was greater equality between different types of schools. The Minister launched this report in as low-key a way as he could and he did so without acknowledging the work of teachers, parents, communities and public servants in delivering a fairer, more successful system. He also failed to acknowledge that the DEIS programme is being targeted for cuts precisely when it is delivering major progress.

Although Government speakers will obviously ignore it in their speeches, the facts show that cuts to disadvantaged schemes were first proposed by the Minister in his review of spending dated 9 September 2011. The cuts which have been implemented since were not imposed reluctantly; they were proposed by the Department as merely removing anomalies and damaging no one. The cut of 700 career guidance posts was also suggested by the Department last year. In the internal documentation the cut was referred to as the "termination" of the dedicated guidance service. When the backlash occurred, the Taoiseach and many Ministers claimed that nothing was being terminated and that schools were simply getting the flexibility they had asked for, an appalling and disgraceful statement to make and the Minister is continuing in this vein. I have met career guidance teachers and I invite anyone to meet them in schools throughout the country. There is much talk about cyberbullying, mental health and suicide among young people. This was a disgraceful act. It cut at the heart of the infrastructure in our second level schools, which is in place to deal with vulnerable young people. Teachers and principals will explain that the volume of the issues with which they are dealing is growing. It was a mistake and it should be reversed.

It was a shame that the Labour Party made that particular cut. It refers to fairness and equality but it continues to work against these principles in its education policy. I believe in a greater diversity of patronage at primary level but it is difficult not to compare the time the Government has spent on that issue to the time spent on real equality issues, including those to which I have referred. We will be setting out a constructive alternative approach to the budget to be announced next month. We acknowledge the many areas where tough decisions must be implemented but we do not accept that there is no alternative to every decision taken by every Minister.

Education deserves to receive the priority it was promised before the election and in the programme for Government. The Labour Party and Fine Gael will be held to account by the people for their broken promises, but they will also be held to account if the people see their decisions doing immense damage but do nothing to reverse them. I call on the Minister to reverse the career guidance decision. We saw what occurred in Wexford and in certain schools. Following these events the Department and the Minister made a belated intervention to return hours to the schools involved but this is a generic system-wide issue and it should be applied across the board. We should not simply wait for incidents to happen, especially with regard to young people in certain schools, and then move to reverse them. The Minister should acknowledge that this happened. We know it happened and I have the details on file of the schools concerned in respect of which, because of the cuts and the absence of guidance, the Minister subsequently intervened. We must be serious. There is no point in Oireachtas committees meeting with various groups working in the area of mental health when we neglect the one relevant structure in place, a dedicated, ring-fenced service which was doing a good deal of work in terms of helping young people at a vulnerable stage in their lives. The Minister decided to unilaterally take it out and leave it up to the schools. A more honest approach would have involved doing it differently or not doing it at all.

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