Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to be able to speak on this Bill. I compliment the Minister and wish him all the best in his new portfolio. I look forward to him engaging not only in this but also in many other areas with local communities.

I salute the boards of management, the parents' councils and the entire school community in my constituency. That is all I can speak for. Throughout the years I have served on boards of management of a primary school and a new community college, including setting up that college involving the amalgamation of three schools. Those people must be saluted and complimented on how they operated in difficult circumstances and dealt with calls for change. They are dealing with change.

We need to make haste slowly. We need to look back to where we had local plebiscites on divestment of schools some years ago. There were very mixed reactions. In many areas it was not made clear to them what they were voting on and there were low turnouts. We must not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

There are some good points in the Bill and I compliment the Labour Party on introducing it. We need a reasonable and reasoned debate. The timeframe of 12 months is not unreasonable. We must bring it before the Committee on Education and Skills and it would be important to have public hearings because this has serious ramifications. We do not want to victimise any of the minority faith schools that have been operating under pressure, including some small rural schools in my constituency.

There are other areas that are also very serious. Under the closed school rule, families are being divided. I have been contacted regularly by parents with two or three children in a primary school, and under this rule, based on measurements from satnav, the eye in the sky or whatever, they find they might be a couple of hundred metres nearer to a different school. That has serious implications because the family is divided and there might not be a seat on the school bus, if they get the bus, to get to the school they always went to. It causes huge inconvenience. It is difficult enough for any family to deal with getting their children enrolled in a school. I sympathise with people who have difficulty in getting enrolled for reasons of faith and so on. That should not be happening and, thankfully, it is not happening in my constituency as far as I am aware. We must examine this closely.

We must not just wipe aside the voluntary commitment given by boards of management that we have had and parents' councils in more recent years, and the whole school family. We need volunteers to come forward to support. When we look at the health system, just because we got rid of the religious from it, it has not improved. We need to examine this very carefully, think of the consequences and ramifications and not have undue haste. I look forward to having further debate in committee and to having public hearings also.

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