Fidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael)

By mainstreaming the seven children, the State will lose €40,000 per year. If put into a mainstream class, these children will require five special needs assistants and a half time resource teacher, and that does not take into account the mainstream class teacher's salary. Members of this House spoke about how educationally unsound this move is but now we have evidence that it is also financially unsound. I encourage every school to do a similar cost exercise.

I encourage the Leader to invite the Minister to the House to address this issue because I am sure he does not want it to cost the State more money. It is causing parents and teachers much grief because they know the effect it will have on children.

Equally flawed is the social partnership model on which the current Taoiseach and the previous one have relied. It is not working. There was great news yesterday with the announcement of 500 new jobs in Hewlett-Packard, but that is in stark contrast to the fact that we are losing approximately 1,000 jobs per day in the private sector. We rely on it for revenue to pay for the public service——