Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Consider a child who starts in junior infants class with a speech and language difficulty. If the difficulty is unidentified and untreated for two years, it will become a real and substantial problem for the child. Additional supports will be required for the child, which means the costs are increased. Alternatively, scarce resources are overstretched. This type of situation is happening in every part of the State yet, astonishingly, the two relevant Ministers do not appear to be even talking to each other about it.

I raise this issue specifically as an example of how fundamentally public services have become unstuck. If the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Ruairí Quinn, continues to view public sector reform through the prism of the bottom line, he will leave behind a system that will take decades to fix. There is little point in telling the Dáil time and again that Fianna Fáil left the country in pieces. We know that; it is a fact. However, we also know that this Government is now complicit in and party to deepening that damage. The problem is that when this Government stepped into the breach it did not usher in its democratic revolution. Instead, it took Fianna Fáil's so-called recovery strategy and began to implement it.

We all know that spending must be reduced to address the deficit, but not to the degree carried out by this Government and not by affecting the same people repeatedly, particularly our children and young students. What is required is that the Minister come to the Dáil with a strategy for fixing the education system during the remainder of this Government's term of office. All the rhetoric about lifelong learning or a knowledge economy becomes farcical and lacks any credibility when it comes from the mouth of an Administration that pauperises the education system.

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