Joe McHugh (Donegal, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief because the points have been well made and I do not have to re-emphasise their importance.

To concentrate on Deputy Buckley's contribution, he referred to resilience, mindfulness and respect, not just the continuum from primary to secondary school but also onwards into the workplace. Developing that confidence is something we very much value as a nation because we have a long history of our future not being clear-cut where people emigrated at 16 or 17 years of age and arrived in environments such as a building site in London to be asked what their trade was and overnight became a chippie or a brickie. We have to work on the resilience that has been built up at an educational level in a meaningful way.

The Deputy emphasised the importance of coping skills but that is not to say that every generation knew how their world would map out when they were growing up. I recall a statistic given of a family of 12 young people in Donegal, ten of whom became priests and nuns, and all of whom emigrated to Africa to work as teachers and so on. I refer to that resilience.

Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan emphasised that it very well. That ethos, philosophy and learning model has been passed from generation to generation and it has put us in a different space. In terms of my diaspora role, when I travelled as Minister of State with responsibility for international development and I met highly educated Irish people in key positions in different organisations. Speaking to their peers in different countries, if we were to analyse the skills Irish people have over other people in terms of getting into those key positions, it was emotional intelligence and the ability to listen and to take a step back. It was about having that awareness. I do not believe that has anything to do with DNA. It comes about through parenting. The education system has to have a major role in that regard, but we need to do more.

I agree with Deputy Funchion's comments. As a former youth worker who spent a few years in a community setting, I could see the value of the informal approach to helping people work on the creative aspects and not restricting them in terms of their spirit or creativity ability to do new things and face new challenges. We have to be conscious of that.

The Deputy's comment about taking the stress out of schools is apt. It is not just about stress in schools. Everybody is stressed. Parents are stressed. They are working hard and trying to juggle childcare, whether it is travelling from Mullingar to drop their child at a crèche at 5.30 in the morning or whatever. It is a different world. It is about taking a holistic approach to look at what is happening outside the school. I take the Deputy's point in that regard.

I agree with Deputy O'Sullivan on the question of sharing best practice. Many schools are doing many different projects. When I visited all the Gaeltacht schools throughout the country as Minister of State with responsibility for the Gaeltacht, I learned that no two schools are the same. They are unique. They have cultural nuances in terms of the region but they are all doing different things. They are working with industry and communities. There is volunteerism. There is a great momentum around physical education in many primary schools. It is about how we share that best practice, what is working and what is not working. We need to be clear about policy when we are bringing different groups or individuals from the outside in because the policy guidelines are important in that regard.

I was struck by something when thinking about the new physical education curriculum for the leaving certificate. That will stand out as an outlier if we do not put the same type of effort into primary school, particularly in terms of young girls. A recent statistic indicated that half of all young girls drop out of sport at the age of 12 or 13.

If we do not encourage them to get involved in sport at primary school level the leaving cert curriculum is left as an outlier. I am conscious of that and I know much work is going on in primary schools. A lot of it is done by volunteers. Schools have some funding for it, but it is something I am keen to pursue and look at.

Deputy O'Sullivan spoke of the good work that has been done in different generations through the years. I would be interested in finding out more about On My Own Two Feet, the programme at the school where she taught, if she would not mind sending me some information. She is right about RE, religious education, classes. There is sometimes an argument around religion, but the religion classes I took were more about getting a bit of space and time to think abut things. Whether we call it RE, philosophy or meditation, we have to create the space for young people to take a step back from their busy lives.

Deputy Browne, who has left, spoke about the waiting lists for psychologists. There are resourcing issues affecting the National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, and counselling. We need to beef those services up. That is where we come in as a Parliament. We must make the choices on where those resources are spent.

I refer also to speech and language therapy. That takes place outside the school, through the HSE. We have already started teasing that out within the Department. Conversations were happening before I joined the Department examining on-site speech and language therapy as an option for schools. That would be very practical and common sense.

I do not want to keep people here by filibustering - I note that I have two minutes and 20 seconds left. On a personal note, I was at a funeral in my parish this morning. We said goodbye to a woman from Carrigart who was a principal in Loreto Letterkenny. She started out as a home economics teacher, before moving to the Department's inspectorate and developing the home economics curriculum. She came back to become deputy principal and then principal. Her journey from being a practitioner to working in the Department gave her insight as a principal. Her colleagues are broken-hearted as she was a very young woman. Listening to them, one of the biggest observations was that she kept the ways of a home economics teacher. She was the person who cared for her students in a very compassionate way. That is something that we should never underestimate when we talk about the new well-being policy. We have leaders in our schools to whom we must look. We have to look at their life journeys, experiences and new ways of doing things. That said, old ways are good too. She was bid farewell today by the many people who knew her, her students and the whole community. They were also acknowledging her very important legacy of education. She never forgot where she came from and the key skills in teaching; helping people when they are in need, when they are in a corner and when they need a lift. She did that so well. Her name was Nora Friel.

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