Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister has said it feels unfair; in fact, he agrees that it is unfair. When he presented this initiative as part of last year's budget, the implication was that it would benefit all schools. That meant that schools all over the country had the expectation they would be included in the scheme, but 76% then found out that they would be excluded and get nothing. It is easy understand why they felt that was unfair. Most grant schemes are based on need, but the Minister is not trying to assess the needs of individual schools. There is a big difference between those schools with long-established book rental schemes covering all subjects and years and those schools which may have only set up their schemes in the last year or two, some of which got into debt in doing so. The Minister is now leaving such schools with that debt and excluding them from this new seed capital scheme. In essence, he is punishing them for having taken the initiative in setting up a book rental scheme.

I remember a banner displayed at a recent Labour Party conference which made reference to cutting the costs to parents of sending their children to school. Little did parents know that 76% of schools would be excluded from the new book rental scheme. It is ironic that the Minister makes the claim that he is cutting costs for parents, while at the same time the Government has cut the back to school allowance by 50%, as well as the minor works grant, and stopped the summer works scheme for two years. These cuts have meant that the very parents to which the Minister refers have had to dig deeper into an ever decreasing pocket to try to come up with the money that the Government has taken from them.

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