Paschal Donohoe (Fine Gael)

Other speakers have called for a debate on active citizenship and the role of volunteering in society. Senator Daly in particular hit the nail on the head when he spoke about the important role education plays within this, which I believe should be captured in the debate I hope we have. The Senator indicated that in many cases, comments and culture encouraging citizenship within our students can be glib and one-off but I disagree with this. In my experience I found teachers take these matters very seriously and do their best within the constraints they have to discharge their responsibilities to students. I hope a proper debate on this will lead to more exploration of the issue and ensure the efforts made are not glib or one-off. They deserve to be taken more seriously.

The issue we are facing is that many of the responsibilities we traditionally asked of parents and families are now being shifted on to teachers in schools. They have to pick up the slack in that regard. With the budget coming up, one of the pressures contributing to that has been the change in our tax system and the move to individualisation, which has undermined to a degree the role which the family can play in discharging those duties.

I hope when this debate comes up we can properly recognise the role played by teachers in our society and also spend time looking at the role played by the tax system in the issue. Notwithstanding the pressures suffered by the Minister, I hope measures will be taken to rectify this matter in the impending budget.