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

How is the Minister able to provide an indicative figure of 34 for schools likely to lose a teacher? How can that particular number be extracted without extracting the other figures? It simply beggars belief. What is the Department doing if it cannot identify the number of students in the system and the number of teachers who will be employed next year? Schools have already lodged appeals in respect of the posts they are expected to lose, yet the Minister cannot tell me today how many and which schools will be in that category.

I put it to the Minister that the Department is withholding this information because it does not want it to become clear which schools will lose a teacher and which will not gain a teacher as a consequence of the cuts that have been introduced. The Minister has targeted those cuts at the half of all primary schools which have five teachers or fewer. His failure to provide the information I have requested is unacceptable. The most recent available data show that as of September 2012, 124 schools are in the categories I indicated and are therefore in line to lose a teacher. We cannot assess how that figure compares with the figure for last year without access to the data I have requested. After five months, I can only conclude that this is a deliberate strategy by the Department. I cannot see how the information is so complicated that it cannot be made available to the public and on the floor of the Dáil.

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