Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It is strange the word "education" is not mentioned. That worries me. There is a reason for being worried about it, given the result of the setting up of these super-quangos in the past, such as, for example, the HSE, which we all know turned into an utter disaster. The HSE replaced the health boards. While there is no question the health boards had major problems, at least they were more locally based and, in my opinion, could have been reformed in a way that was more responsive to local need and more representative of the different stakeholders. Instead, we got a super-quango, the HSE, which is unaccountable, it seems, even to the Department of Health.

The current Government has rightly been critical and said it would get rid of the HSE and so on. However, who were the people appointed by the last Government to the board of the HSE and who have made such a bags of it? They were people connected to commerce, trade, finance and so on. There were virtually no health professionals on the HSE board - that was part of the problem. It was this super-quango which ruined the health service. Some of the people on the board were from big accountancy firms and, oddly, one of the first board appointees was a former chief executive officer of Microsoft. While I am sure he has talents, what the hell is he doing in the HSE?

One seriously begins to ask questions. Is the intended or unintended consequence of this that, as in regard to health, which we saw as a business rather than a public service, we may be doing the same with further education, which is seen as a business which we can then outsource to the private education sector? Education is not a business. For sure, it should be connected to employment and directed towards training people for industry and work in any sector of the economy, but it is not a business and it should not be just done on the basis of number-crunching, unit costs and all that kind of thing. That does not add up to good education. As I have said to the Minister of State, the word on the ground from the people actually delivering further education is that the student-staff ratio will seriously undermine what is supposed to be the central purpose of all this, which is the quantity of courses and places that can be made available for people.

In my own constituency, and this could be replicated elsewhere, Dún Laoghaire currently has a VEC for these three colleges but this will now be amalgamated into the education and training board for the whole of Dublin. How is this rationalisation, if it is not just a cutback, going to improve the governance of further education in a place like Dún Laoghaire, where, in fact, it was very responsive to local need? Again, the teachers say the courses they developed over the years built up a real rapport with the needs of the people in the sector, and the courses were developed and were directed towards the needs of the people coming in and towards local business and local industry. It was dynamic. While I am not saying there were not problems with other aspects of the governance, removing this to some board at a citywide level, where that connection is broken between the governance of further education and local needs and dynamics, is a real danger.

I would like to hear the Government's response to some of these points. Obviously, it will be discussed in more detail on Committee Stage. I reiterate that while the idea is good in principle, if this reform, as has often been the case particularly in the current climate against a backdrop of cuts and austerity, turns out to be the packaging in which cuts and reductions in resources are implemented, it may not achieve its ends. There is considerable evidence that some of the measures being implemented by the Government may militate in the opposite direction. I hope that is not the case but I would like to hear more assurance from the Government that this will not be the case because teachers and people working in the further education sector tell me that this will be the real net effect. Could the Government respond to those points?

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