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

The troika is not an excuse for this kind of thing. The troika documents are littered with talk of structural reform and I simply cannot discern how either the Minister of State or the troika could possibly justify these cuts, which will have an adverse impact on the ability of the State to educate and retrain people, particularly those in the further education sector who are among those least well-served by the mainstream education system.

Moreover, alleviation is not enough because it was implied that changing the teacher-pupil ratio from 1:17 to 1:19 simply would mean two additional people in a class. However, as the Minister of State is aware and as those who are involved in the sector have made clear, that is not the impact. Potentially, up to 500 teaching posts will be lost because people work part-time on a rota basis and so on and this could mean whole swathes of courses will be wiped out. As the Minister of State has acknowledged, many schools already are enrolling student numbers well over the caps and were under-resourced even before these cuts came in. Consequently, the impact on the capacity of the sector to provide a service to those who need it most and to sectors of Irish society that need it most in the current economic climate will be extremely significant. This simply cannot be justified and alleviation is not enough. These cuts must be reversed because there is simply no justification or rationale for them.

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