Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I understand the point of view the Deputy has articulated. I do not disagree with the perception of unfairness for some schools which had the wherewithal, the leadership, the passion or the commitment of parents who had the resources to dig deep into their own pockets to provide for a book rental scheme. My response was to do something every Deputy who had been in the education portfolio in opposition in recent years had done, namely, to listen to the voices of parents who had complained about two things in the context of the cost of sending young people to school - the cost of books and uniforms. I will leave the issue of uniforms to one side for now because we are dealing with the issue of books today.

I wanted every child in every school to have access to a book rental scheme because that was what parents wanted and, in many cases, needed. I had the choice of spreading a very small amount of money - €5 million a year - over three years to try to close the gap for more than 25% of the schools in question - based on the Deputy's figures, one could call it 20% - to make sure every parent could send his or her child to school and be faced with a bill of €40 to access a book rental scheme, as distinct from having to buy books. It was a difficult choice, but I made it in the interests of fairness for parents and pupils in these schools. Upfront in a way it was necessary to ignore some schools – they were not all well resourced schools or parents, but they had developed schemes owing to leadership from the principal and board of management. If we have extra resources, we will go back to the more recently established book rental schemes. Three years ago and for all of the time the Deputy’s predecessors were Ministers for education, we had no information on what schools, if any, had a book rental scheme. We now know what we are dealing with and we are trying to have a level playing pitch.

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