Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I can guarantee that. It might not necessarily be their school of first preference but I can guarantee that everyone in Kildare and also in my own constituency of Dublin West, where this also occurs, will receive a secondary school place. That is an absolute commitment and an absolute guarantee. Figures are used from the census and also from child benefit data. When it comes to secondary schools, the number of children enrolled in primary schools determines the need for secondary school places. What we have, though, on a lot of occasions is children's names being put down for multiple schools but schools cannot share that information for data protection reasons. What happens, and it certainly happens in my constituency, is that it appears at the start that there is a huge number of children without school places. Then, when the places are allocated and accepted or not, that number becomes much smaller and very often those children are not actually in the catchment are of the school to which they have applied.

See this speech in context