Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

As a teacher I love this initiative. It is transformative. The quicker it rolls out, the better. There is one small flaw that I would love to see the Minister address. The data set that designates a school as a DEIS school is based on Pobal statistics which are linked to the census that happens every five years. A child factored into census 2022 could very well be a teenager or possibly even an adult depending on their age. It does not truly capture the transience of the rental market. It does not capture the transience of the large number of Ukrainian people and international protection applicants who come into our county. It does not fully get the make-up of a community. Shannon in County Clare is a perfect example. Lisdoonvarna is another example where the population has increased fourfold. We can see that deprivation has come with that but it is not fully captured in the statistics. The best data set, and other countries use it, is the school census that is run by the school inspectorate in a school or a school cluster. It involves taking a temperature gauge of a range of poverty or deprivation indices. That is what you should use as the data set, rather than the old traditional five-year census.

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