Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It is important to say that the huge and detrimental impact Covid-19 is having on education at the moment is to do with the disastrous strategy this Government has pursued. We argued that it should listen to public health advice in advance of Christmas and that if it did not, we would be in a disastrous situation in January. Tragically, we now are. Now our young people and some of those most vulnerable with special needs are suffering the consequences of the Government's dire strategy, the so-called Plan for Living with Covid, the yo-yo in and out of surge and lockdown. It is important to stress that point.

Having said that, on the issue of special needs, the Minister should just own up. There is a suggestion in the statement she has just sprung on us that she has got agreement on reopening on 21 January when she has not actually got agreement. Of course we need special needs provision and it is a priority, but it also has to be in compliance with public health. It must be ensured that teachers and children and their families are in a safe situation. Here is a suggestion. If I were the Minister, rather than making big announcements without having got agreement, I would have an urgent forensic audit carried out as to which parents want their children to go into school and which teachers are willing to go in and teach them and I would try to match those two things.

I am, as I am sure all of us are, inundated with communications from leaving certificate students who are stressed to bits about not knowing what is happening. They need certainty and the Minister cannot give it to them. She is giving them fake certainty to the effect that, come hell or high water, there will be a leaving certificate, essentially. She cannot say that on epidemiological grounds. The Government could not predict in December that we would be in the situation we are in now, in January; how on earth can it predict what will happen in June? The truth is that it cannot. It is therefore absolutely wrong to force students to do a leaving certificate when the Minister cannot provide them with that certainty. She should give them choice, alternatives and the certainty that those choices and alternatives will be available now.

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