Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this very important motion. I attended an event last week organised by the Children's Rights Alliance to discuss the issue of child poverty, including the issue of the cost of education. It is striking that Ireland is the fifth richest country in the world on a GDP per capitabasis, but one in nine children in the State live in constant poverty. This is 134,000 children. These are the children who are going to go hungry this summer because school is out and they cannot access the school meals, which a minority of students are able to access. This is an absolute scandal. It is a scandal that is not discussed enough in this House or generally in the media. It is an absolute scandal because it is completely unnecessary. Ireland could target and could achieve the complete elimination of child poverty. It is a question of resources, including resources to make education truly free.

In Ireland we have a supposedly free education system. We even have, supposedly, free third level education, but we will not even go there for now. Yet, in this system of free education, in the coming months parents will be asked to pay for lots of books, for uniforms, for transport and for the so-called voluntary contributions. In any year, the costs will add up immensely for parents but particularly in this year, given the cost-of-living crisis, which is hitting people so hard, it simply will be unaffordable for many people.

I believe it was an Irish League of Credit Unions survey that looked at the costs for parents to send kids to school. It is truly shocking. It costs more than €1,000 to send a child to primary school and nearly €1,500 to send a child to secondary school. A very good survey was also done a couple of years ago by Barnardos that broke down some of these costs.

For example, 76% of parents with a child in primary school and 96% of parents with a child in secondary school report having to purchase a crested uniform. Some 42%, or less than half of secondary school pupils, have a book rental scheme available in their school. Parents of primary school pupils pay, on average, €50 towards a school book rental scheme, while parents of secondary school students are paying €115. The vast majority of parents are being asked to pay a so-called voluntary contribution.

The bottom line is that in an education system in which education is supposedly free, all of these things should be provided. Parents should not have to pay for anything to enable their children to go to school. School meals should be provided for every child in the State and that should be extended to the summertime for all those who want to avail of it. The State should provide all children in school with nutritious, quality and hot meals. That is a basic requirement and could be done for about €300 million. The same amount could be raised through a 50% windfall tax on the energy companies and the war profiteering currently taking place.

Similarly, there is no reason we have to be shackled to the profiteering of the book companies, which bring out their new books every year or every couple of years and say people must buy them. We should have free book schemes, as many European countries have, where the books are provided as part of the education system.

We should not have a system in which schools are underfunded and then seek voluntary contributions, placing unacceptable pressure on parents who simply cannot afford to pay them. This also puts children into a very difficult situation. We should simply resource our schools properly. The whole voluntary contribution system embeds inequality in our education system because the amount a school serving an area with many higher income earners gets is much different from the amount a school gets in a deprived working class area. Educational inequality is embedded through that.

I will briefly raise with the Minister a point about a school in my constituency, St. Aidan’s Community School in Brookfield, because it is related to educational quality. The school has a serious need for the repair and maintenance of the roof, external walls and windows, which are leaking. It has also received a report showing approximately €100,000 would have to be spent to make the school fire-safe. Remedial work on this and that will be done to patch up the school when this large site could be used as a facility for the community. There is space on the site for a community centre, for example. The matter needs to be investigated because, fundamentally, it appears that we need to build a new, quality school building for the school. I will be in touch with the Minister directly on the issue.

See this speech in context