Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I wish the Minister well in his appointment to the education portfolio. He has expressed an interest in becoming Minister for Education and Skills from time to time and I hope that, now that he is Minister, he will enjoy it. It is 100 years since the Easter Rising, and many of the signatories of the Proclamation who were executed after the Rising, from James Connolly to Pádraig Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh, as well as being artists and poets, were teachers. They expressed the most profound interest in education as a way of transforming people's lives in a positive way. Education would be productive from the point of view of Ireland flourishing economically. More important, it would help the whole person, whether boy or girl, to develop in accordance with their ambitions.

In Ireland, including my constituency, Dublin West, where there has been an extraordinary population growth, we have been privileged to have patrons, boards of management, teachers, parents and parents associations who, regardless of creed, religion or no religion, have exercised the most incredible spirit of co-operation and dynamism to build and develop a huge number of new schools over the past 20 years. During my participation in politics it has been a tremendous privilege to be part of it.

I have a question about the capital programme. We are all aware that the process of forming a Government has been extremely long and, presumably, very detailed. However, I am very concerned that it has meant, in many Government Departments, that the foot has been taken of the pedal regarding driving the capital programme. There are a number of indications that the capital programme has slowed down very significantly this year. I would like the Minister to explain why that is so. Unless there is something he is not telling us, he has additional resources, which were agreed between Fine Gael and the Labour Party at the time of the budget last year. I do not understand what has happened to the capital programme, given the demands of an increasing population, particularly in the growing parts of cities, towns and counties around the country.

For example, I had anticipated that around this time, as schools close for the holidays, in Dublin West two schools would be completely rebuilt. One of them is the old parish school of St. Mochta's, which is 150 years old. Some time ago, at the request of the Department of Education and Skills, it increased from two streams to four streams and took, as a consequence, in the public interest, a huge number of prefabs. Now, work that was expected to commence this summer, with the project at stage 2B, has been stalled for the whole period during which the discussions on the formation of a Government were taking place. I do not understand it.

When I was Tánaiste, I was very involved in pushing with the then Minister, very successfully, to get the junior and senior primary schools rebuilt in Corduff on the north side of the Navan Road, an area with a very large population. We had an agreement and all of it has been going very well. Again, I expected to the construction start. The school is in an area where many of the parents are not particularly well off. Again, it seems to be stuck in the slow-down of public service development on the capital side during the hiatus of forming a Government. I would like the Minister to tell us about the capital programme and what exactly has happened.

Both of the previous speakers mentioned the technological universities. What is happening regarding the Dublin Institute of Technology? The Minister has been a very ambitious driver of job creation and investment into Ireland by companies, including local companies, SMEs and international companies. The stalling of the technological university project is a bad decision for the country as a whole and the areas that have institutes of technology. These are real drivers in a programme for Government that is, apparently, committed to regional development. I speak as somebody who has lectured in the technological sector over a long period of time before I became a public representative. These are real drivers of a range of different kinds of enterprise.

A political change happened in the run up to the last general election when people became less convinced about the technological university model.

This is wrong because if we want to drive technological university development, the Government needs to put its commitment to action where its rhetoric is and deliver on it. It would be an enormous dereliction to walk back from what has been achieved by the Minister's two predecessors, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan and Ruairí Quinn, in respect of developing the technological university sector. I would like to hear the Minister say this is back on the agenda in a way that we will see such development because there is no reason we should not see it. Campus developments have been stalled.

I challenge him on when he will publish the Cassells report as a matter of urgency and refer it to the Oireachtas committee on education to allow for a full debate on the current funding model and what some people describe as a "crisis" in higher education and on identifying solutions to that. The all-party committee should offer an open forum for debate on the future of higher education. We have secured one of the great achievements in Europe in respect of the numbers of people participating in third level but we have to invest. Both capital and current investment are critical to this. The Government has to get people in the system to contribute their views on the future strategy. The higher education sector cannot be allowed to drift along without addressing problems of underfunding in the system. The Minister has spoken a great deal about how important the sector is for the future of all our young people and how important is its contribution to economic and social progress. We cannot be misled by simplistic solutions or the temptation to accept without proper debate policies which have been adopted elsewhere.

For instance, student loans are often presented as the only solution to financing higher education. Is that the Minister's view? We need to hear it in the context of this Estimates discussion. When students in the US emerge from college at either graduate or postgraduate level, many of them carry a debt burden that lasts for most of the rest of their lives. We need a debate about this. There will be no solution to the plight of the higher education sector without a long-term commitment to greater public investment. Approximately 50% of students get grants, which is a significant achievement of our education system, but there has to be a funding solution that allows higher education institutions to offer the best in class, the best in Europe or the best in the world to be part of their profile and given the commitment to education in Ireland, that is not necessarily difficult to achieve but it will demand a commitment to resources.

Whatever happened to the Minister who has always been a great champion of information being available to Members in respect of economics and figures for the various portfolios he has held as spokesperson or the Departments he has led? By mid-morning today, we still did not have a copy of the Revised Estimates.

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