Seanad debates

Wednesday, 10 October 2007

6:00 pm

Photo of Dominic HanniganDominic Hannigan (Labour)

I welcome the Minister to the Chamber. Access to education is a major problem for young families in Dublin, Meath, Louth, Wicklow, Kildare and throughout the country. It is a problem that is growing day by day. It is a ticking time-bomb and it is due to the fact that we have an obsolete system for planning new classrooms in schools. We suffer from a planning system that is disjointed and a management system that is out of date and overseen by a Minister who, with all respect, does not appear to have a grip on the problem.

The problem is that there is no central person with overall responsibility for bringing together the various strands of the planning process. For example, planners are responsible for zoning sites for schools. Councillors are responsible for voting for that rezoning. The landowners are only interested in getting top dollar for their sites. The churches or the educational establishments are responsible for being the school patron. When something goes wrong, the Department of Education and Science seeks to pass the blame on to one or all of those organisations when the reality is that the only organisation that could possibly control the whole area is the Department.

Last year in Laytown I saw the damage this system failure causes when, because of the demand for classroom spaces and the lack of planning, some children went to school in the mornings while others attended in the afternoons and some children had to take lessons in the gym. I saw it in Ratoath as well where more rationing was needed because there were no classroom spaces. The rationing was done on the basis of age. Some schools required the child to be five by September, others said August while other schools required the child to be five by May. One can imagine the implications that is having for family life. Young families have to find additional funds for child care costs, take extra holidays or rope in the child's grandparents to do a spot of extra babysitting. That is all because we have an obsolete planning system.

This year there has been rationing of school places on the basis of religion, with some parents being asked to produce baptismal certificates. Last week, I spoke to a man who tried to get his daughter into the local school but he was refused because his daughter had been baptised as an Orthodox Christian, not a Catholic. Rather than the child walking five minutes to the local school, that family must drive 45 minutes every day to ensure the child gets an education.

Access is also a problem in the area of special needs. Owing to a lack of facilities, parents find it difficult to get suitable educational facilities for their child. Special needs education is being rationed as well.

Let us be clear about where the fault lies. This rationing is put in place because of a lack of school places. It is not the fault of the school, nor is it the fault of the churches. The fault lies with the Department of Education and Science for overseeing an obsolete planning process.

The country was founded on the basis that educational access was a right. Bunreacht na hÉireann states, in Article 42, that the State shall provide for free primary education. What about the spirit of the Proclamation which states that we should seek to treat and cherish all the children of the nation equally? All children have the right to learn with dignity and in comfort but that is not happening.

It is for these reasons that we must have a national convention on education. We must sort out the mess in the planning process, make more spaces available and modernise the Department of Education and Science.

People talk about the role education has played in the creation of the Celtic tiger. It now appears we are taking education for granted. While we discuss these matters in this House, other countries are honing their education systems to equip their children with the ability to be at the forefront of the knowledge economy. I urge the Government to face facts, recognise our system needs changing and call a national convention to sort out this crisis.

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