Joe McHugh (Donegal, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy would not be raising this if he thought there was no value in doing so. There is value in raising a matter that will take pressure off individual schools. I am going to say something that is not policy. I am saying it as a Minister. I am looking at the future. I refer to the collection of small primary schools that are found even within one parish. The small school symposium will look at ways to run schools more effectively in the future. As the Deputy says, each of these individual schools currently has to submit accounts to the Department. It costs every single school the same amount. This is what we need from politics. We must be big enough and mature enough as a political system to say that if there are better, more competent and more proactive ways of doing things that will allow savings for schools that have to fill their tanks, pay for the gas, or look after the bread-and-butter issues, they will be discussed at the small schools symposium. I ask the Deputy to contact me formally on this issue if he would like it to be raised in that forum.

See this speech in context