Joe Flaherty (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State very much. It is safe to say there was nothing in that reply that will send me home with the wind in my sails this evening.

Notwithstanding that, I note there are probably young secondary school teachers who will tell me they were in junior cycle when it was agreed to carry out a review of the JCSP as part of the implementation of the framework for junior cycle back in 2015. I appreciate that work was paused as a consequence of Covid-19 but at least it is good to hear that it has now been resumed.

I will draw the Minister of State's attention but more specifically, the attention of the Department officials who are hopefully listening, to a letter that appeared in the Irish Examiner newspaper recently from Ms Andrea Dillon, secretary of the school libraries group of the Library Association of Ireland, and Ms Kathleen Moran, senior librarian and JCSP library project chair. They stated that they wanted to:

reiterate our realistic and concrete demand; the minister [for education] must, at long last, fulfil the department’s 2005 commitment to extend the Junior Certificate School Programme Demonstration Library Project to all Deis schools. Recent joint Oireachtas committee reports have identified this as "an urgent national priority". The groundbreaking benefits that school libraries confer upon students from deprived backgrounds are available in only 30 out of 235 Deis schools.

It is fair to say that based on that, it is fairly damning. We are failing our pupils in many of our most disadvantage and deprived communities right across Ireland. We have a proud literary tradition in this country. As we try to counter the influence of online material and smartphones, at the very minimum, we need to be giving schools is access to a school library and books for pupils. I think the House would agree that in the region of €3 million per annum to fund this service nationally is derisory and needs to be rapidly improved.

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