Liam Fitzgerald (Fianna Fail)

All is not well. We know that more must be done and the Minister had no difficulty acknowledging that today, in terms of pupil-teacher ratios and investment in all levels of education, particularly primary and second levels.

We have read about the percentage of GDP invested in education. Like the Minister, I am not happy with the idea of this being expressed in terms of GDP. The gross domestic product includes the huge volumes of money taken out of the country by foreign multinational companies. This should be factored out of the calculations if we are to compare like with like. In Britain GDP and GNP are almost the same, but this is a very open economy and multinationals are repatriating large sums of money – upwards of 15% of total GDP. Our place in the table of countries was based on GDP data, but it should be based on GNP as the Minister said. In the table of investment in education as a percentage of total unrepatriated income we are in eighth place, which is a significant improvement.