Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for her response. I am hearing a status quoresponse as opposed to the opportunity to change.

The Minister will know this landscape well. For primary teacher education, you will be looking at the three colleges in Dublin or at Limerick. It is a little more open in terms of secondary school education. To be parochial about it - not parochial but regional - there are 600,000 people living within an hour of Waterford city and in the south-east region, yet there is no option to pursue teacher training in that region. That means people like myself who trained as teachers had to leave the region and often, once a young person leaves a region, he or she is lost for good, not to mention the additional expense placed on parents. SETU already has a well-established school of education which caters at the moment for further education but there is an opportunity to allow a new player to enter and provide teacher training within the south-east region. I am sure other areas would welcome this opportunity. We know we have a need for additional teacher training. We should be looking at designating SETU and other areas as centres of excellence.

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