Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Tá áthas orm deis a bheith agam labhairt ar an ábhar seo. I am very pleased to have an opportunity to contribute to the debate.

It is necessary to have an overview of where the Government is making cuts. As has been pointed out by my colleagues, they can be made in three places. The first is in rural schools. We know that the rural schools system works. Maps showing areas of social disadvantage show many rural areas fit into this category. On the other hand, with regard to levels of educational attainment, rural areas score as high as urban areas. The Minister is, therefore, trying to break a system that has been working for generations. Both he and staff in the Department have an ideological hang-up when it comes to small rural communities. It is well known that the Minister believes we should all live in towns and cities. In his view, the traditional settlement pattern is wrong and outdated. According to him, we should conform to some continental model.

He then targeted the DEIS schools in band 1. Despite what any map shows, the reality is that when examining social and educational disadvantage, one should examine the areas in which the DEIS schools operate. We have witnessed the demise of the RAPID programme under the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Phil Hogan. We know that the very day children are born in RAPID areas, they are at a disadvantage. Instead of trying to minimise disadvantage systematically, as Fianna Fáil was trying to do, the current Minister tried last year to compound it.

The areas with the lowest level of access to third level education are disadvantaged urban areas. While there are people throughout the country who do not proceed to third level education, only 10% to 20% of students from RAPID areas reach third level. Therefore, those who most need access to PLC courses and further education, and who require the chance to do the leaving certificate, are those in the very areas of which the Labour Party would always claim to be the champion. Despite this, these are the areas targeted for the cut.

We hear a lot of easy talk around here that class sizes are being increased only by two. Those who are making these statements obviously have no experience of PLC or adult education. Owing to the wide variety of courses that must be offered, the reality is that class sizes will be small, by definition. This is because the courses are necessarily technical and specialised, unlike Irish, English and mathematics as taught in an ordinary school. The classes are small because the demand is low in certain places. Making a comparison with university, where there may be 300 students in a lecture theatre, is an absolute nonsense. Anybody who went to third level will know the lecture is part of what one is offered but that one also gets tutorials. There are some very small specialised classes in universities. If one calculated the total number of staff, including graduate staff, in any university and compared it with the number of students, one would find the pupil-teacher ratio is very good.

I am fascinated by how slow the Minister is to curb the excesses in universities. Let us be honest: universities still spend money in many cases in a way that other any organisation, including the Government, could only dream of. If adult education had to be subject to a cut, why was it not where it could be carried?

We must always recognise that those who have had advantages in life, be they associated with their background, family or good education, will always swim to the top. Those who need the most support are those who have experienced disadvantage or those who might not have had an education, for all sorts of reasons. There is a direct relationship between employment attainment and one's employability. Those with degrees, even degrees that are not directly relevant to the job being applied for, have a significant advantage over those who do not have a leaving certificate. Therefore, if we want to deal with the long-term, intractable unemployment problem, we must ensure educational attainment for those without a leaving certificate. Specialised education for those with a special skill that does not match the skills covered in the general curriculum will likely result in their being employed. If we do not achieve this, we will consign the cohort in question to a life of unemployment. That is absolutely terrible for them and not good for society.

The decisions regarding disadvantage may not seem serious on their own but if they are all stacked on top of one another, one suddenly realises there is considerable compounding of attention against very vulnerable groups, which the Government seems to be targeting all the time. We have pointed out time and again the manner in which the Minister for Social Protection seems very much set on targeting families and women. A plethora of Ministers seem to have as their great goal in government the demise of rural Ireland. It seems the urban disadvantaged are also very much in the Ministers' sights. For the life of me, I do not know what the urban disadvantaged have done to offend the Government.

Let us consider the compounding of three decisions. The Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government has decided to withdraw the co-ordinators from the RAPID programme. He has effectively wound down the programme in full and is not holding any meetings of the RAPID co-ordinating committee. We had been making significant progress in giving people a say within their communities, with the scientific focus on the urban communities facing the greatest disadvantage. The Minister for Social Protection said she would add to this step by the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government and consequently she has put in her penny's worth of attack. She has withdrawn the allowance that enables people to buy the books required to attend courses and she has reduced the back-to-education allowance, which is focused very much on those on low incomes. The Minister for Education and Skills says he will top that by attacking further education and PLC courses.

People have argued that we should not get political about this. While the Government keeps pointing out that there is a fixed amount of money, which we all accept, it should note the real issue concerns what it should do with that money. The reality is that it has made its choices. The Opposition has a perfect right and obligation to pose alternatives to those choices if it disagrees with them and to ask the public to make up its mind on them.

The Government has two mantras. It blames everything on what my party was doing in government. When one reads Government scripts, be they from the Department of Education and Skills or the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, one realises it claims as its own the reforming decisions that the former Government was making. I was amazed to hear the current Government talk about SOLAS. On the first day of my term in office as Minister for Social Protection under former Taoiseach Brian Cowen, it was decided that the skills side of FÁS would be the responsibility of the then Department of Education and Science and that the labour activation and employment engagement sides would be the responsibility of the Department of Social Protection. That happened on 28 March 2010. By 1 January 2011, FÁS was already under the ambit of the two Departments. The current Government, which is so critical of everything we did, has tried to claim responsibility for this. Since we are talking about what we had in mind, let us remember that by placing activation under the remit of the Department of Social Protection, we were saying that everybody in receipt of a long-term unemployment payment would have the opportunity, on a continuous basis, either to engage in education or to participate on a training or work scheme to the benefit of the community instead of being paid to do nothing or being penalised for becoming active.

The Government has thrown out that big idea but if it wants to take on board another idea, and we would praise it for doing so, it should complete the work we had started in our time in government. It is utterly ridiculous to be paying the 200,000 who are long-term unemployed and telling them to do nothing rather than inviting them to make a contribution to society, as we know they would wish to do.

Deputy Maloney spoke about fee paying schools. The Minister for Education and Skills has a good knowledge of fee paying schools and he knows the complexity of the issue. Instead of pretending that these issues are all simple and one just needs to pull the €100 million, it is time for the Minister to be upfront and explain to the likes of Deputy Maloney the reasons this is not so simple. For the past month and more there have been nightly protests in the North which are to do with the perceptions of communities in regard to disadvantage. One of the things this State set out to do to the best of its ability, and which it did, was to try to ensure that religious minorities in this State were fairly treated. The Minister of State opposite and the Minister, Deputy Quinn, know that the difficulty with the issue in regard to the private schools relates to the fact that it would have a huge effect on the minority or the Protestant schools. One cannot discriminate between religions and if one is going to make a exception of Protestant private schools, one cannot refuse to allow the Catholic schools have the same dispensation.

It is time we stopped codding ourselves that there was some wrong or selfish interest or that we had a particular interest in private schools. I come from the same neck of the woods as the Minister of State. I went to a non-fee paying school and he went to a fee paying school. That was his right and the right of his parents and the other choice was the right of my parents. I come from a background where the choice was made to select the non-fee paying school but I do not pretend it is a simple issue to withdraw the grants. It is important that the Minister of State explains to his Labour Party colleagues that this is a highly complex issue and that the last thing we should do in this State is to be seen for some political cheapshot to take steps that would discriminate unfairly against the minority faith communities here and that would give ammunition to those who would want to say that we have not treated all of the citizens of this State equally.

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