Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

At present four of the five schools in Wexford town have a waiting list of between 160 and 180 students. This is projected to get worse in the coming years. Loreto has capacity for 720 and that will increase with the new school to 900, an extra 180 places, but it alone has a waiting list of approximately 320 places. That will take six years to complete. We are not even close to addressing the problem.

It is beyond me how Wexford fares so poorly in so many areas. Many issues start with education. It is not without reason that unemployment in Wexford is over 22%, that we have one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the country, that we have high rates of problems with literacy and that we have one of the highest suicide rates. Education must be a vital factor in this but right now, Wexford is being poorly served in educational terms.

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