Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the Minister will keep it under review but I also think that two years, for someone who has already gone through an undergraduate degree, is probably a little bit too much. Teaching is a profession and I know so many people who are in it and love the fact they are there, or would love to get into it. However, it is simply not affordable anymore to be a teacher in our cities and towns and to incur the cost of living which is crippling our public services as whole. The consequences of this include some special education teachers being forced to plug gaps in primary school mainstream classrooms leaving vulnerable students without the level of teaching they deserve; second level posts are left empty; and subjects are disappearing from curriculums in schools across the country. In the Minister's budget she highlighted there would be 700 new teaching posts that could be filled by the budget allocation. I do not see how we will fill them given the fact the Irish National Teachers' Organisation, INTO, is already talking about how we will lose another 250 teachers this year. We have to be real. For the PME the €2,000 will make a slight difference but it will be a drop in the ocean compared to the cost of actually trying to be a teacher in this country which is astronomical at the minute.

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