Kevin Humphreys (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for sharing his time because it is always difficult for a Government backbencher to get time to contribute to debates in the House. I commend him on his response to the motion and the amendment he moved. It is important that the contributions we make tonight be fact based. Figures from the latest OECD Education at a Glance survey confirm that in 2010 Ireland invested 6.4% of GDP on education compared with OECD average of 6.3%. While we can all bandy around these figures, the Government amendment is fact-based and I ask Sinn Féin to accept it as that.

The past five years have been tough and anybody who has been involved in politics or has children in either the education or health system, knows exactly how tough it has been in those years. I commend the Minister, Deputy Quinn, on the work he has done on protecting the education area from cuts.

There has been considerable reporting of potential cuts to education budgets. While I believe much of it has been unfounded, we will know on the day of the budget. It is to the eternal shame of the Catholic Church that the State has been left to pick up the majority of the cost of the redress scheme for the victims of clerical abuse. It has been reported that owing to the high demand for the scheme, €40 million more than budgeted has been spent and will need to be provided for in the budget of the Department of Education and Skills. I believe I would have cross-party support in saying that the children of today should not be made to pay for the liabilities for the redress provided to the children of yesterday for the crimes committed against them. The money that is needed to pay that redress should come from a central fund and should not need to be carried by an education Vote. The Minister would have my support and that of many Deputies if we could achieve that outcome in the budget. A sum of €40 million to come from the education fund for redress for those terrible crimes that were committed against the children of the past is far too heavy a burden for the children of today to carry. We cannot ask the current children to carry that.

I call on the Minister of State, Deputy Ciarán Cannon, who has just come into the Chamber and the Minister to argue strongly about this at the Cabinet table.

Simplistic solutions have been thrown around, but we must be careful because we had simplistic solutions all the way through the boom years and the outcomes were very poor. Prefabs were provided throughout the country and children were left in them for ten to 15 years. That was at a time when there was a great deal of money around. It is to the credit of the Government that there is a classroom building programme throughout the State, for which I commend it.

Earlier I heard Deputy Jonathan O'Brien discussing pupil-teacher ratios, but there can be too much of a focus on pupil-teacher ratios. We need to focus on and measure the outcomes for children coming from these classrooms. As chairman of the City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee and many VEC colleges throughout the country, I have seen children come through the primary education system with poor literacy and numeracy skills under programmes with low pupil-teacher ratios. Therefore, I question the claims made. We should concentrate on measured outcomes, one example of which is to be found in my constituency and the constituency of Deputy Mary Lou McDonald and the Minister of State, Deputy Joe Costello. It is an early learning initiative based in the National College of Ireland in the docklands. It runs a programme entited the parent-child home programme. During the summer I was giving awards to primary school pupils in their first year and it was the first time I had seen at first hand the outcome of the initiative under which people from the community are trained to teach numeracy and literacy skills and parents how to play with their children in an educational manner. This has been rigidly looked at by people from Trinity College Dublin who have said it is cost-effective. When we see the literacy skills of young children, we realise that at last it is giving them an equal playing field in primary school. Certainly, many children from inner city areas start at a great disadvantage.

I will skip over much of my script. The Government must continue with reform. My primary focus is on primary education. All through my time in politics I have seen my community being denied equal opportunity. We must ensure many disadvantaged areas have an equal opportunity. I thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle for his patience.

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