Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will be very brief. The points I tried to make were that the parents in my constituency do not have a choice. They all scramble to try to get their children into the State-funded schools and if this is not possible, they have nowhere else to go. I am not exaggerating when I say that we have only four to five State-funded schools in the area. Our pupils have nowhere to go. The Minister of State can talk all he likes about the fund of €81 million available to the private schools but people in my constituency who have lost their jobs or who have taken substantial cuts in their salaries and whose children are 11 and 12 years of age cannot afford to pay and they have nowhere to go. What can I advise them, as their public representative? I was a school principal in an area and this was a constant problem. I have been assured by the new principal that the problem has got worse in the past years. Despite all the talk about what the private schools have in their funding, I am worried about the parents and the children and their education and not about the private schools, per se.

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