Jonathan O'Brien (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Even if by some miracle, the Cabinet decided to ring-fence the education budget this year and not force the Minister to look for savings of €44 million and possibly €66 million, we will still see cuts because we have had multi-annual year announcements. We will see another reduction in capitation grants of 1% in 2014 and another 1% in 2015 so even if a collective decision was taken at this stage to protect the education budget, we will still see a reduction. We might not get to the question in respect of the Education at a Glance report but that shows that our percentage of public expenditure on education is decreasing from 13.7% to 9.7%. We are now ranked 29th in the OECD in respect of how much we spend on education. I believe the Minister is serious about building a high-quality education sector and a knowledge-based economy but we cannot do so if we keep cutting our budgets at a time when we have an increased number of children going to schools. It is impossible. Something has to give. There must be a line where the quality of education will be directly impacted if we continue to cut and I believe we have reached that point. I believe the Minister is also of the view that have reached such a point. The Government as a collective needs to seriously look at ring-fencing the education budget.

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