Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The allowance of €30,000 can, in fact, be payable to a party of Government. I take it the Taoiseach is not now in receipt of that allowance. Is it fair to say then that he stopped being receipt of that allowance once he received his seal of office from Uachtarán na hÉireann? The Taoiseach might clarify that.

On the plan, all of us want to see children back in school safely and teachers back in the classroom. The Government's plan places a huge burden to act very quickly and, in some cases, to carry out tasks that seem almost impossible in a tight timeframe. There is anxiety among many parents and teachers I have spoken to that time has been left so tight.

There has been an abject failure by successive Governments to deal with Ireland's class sizes. It is an omission in the Government's plan that it has not moved to address this issue. The plan references, for example, classrooms of 80 and 60 sq. m but in many schools, older buildings in particular, classrooms are much smaller than that.

At post-primary level, 1,080 new positions are to be filled in the next five weeks but we are none the wiser as to how it is proposed to achieve this. There is to be a provision of 200 substitutes at primary level but this figure is fewer than half of the substitutes required on a daily basis and has been acknowledged to be wholly inadequate.

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