John Crown (Independent)

I would like to bring to the attention of the Members a very sad article written under the pseudonym of Annie Shipsey in the Village magazine about the problem with regard to special needs assistants. The article was entitled Thank you Mr. Timothy Geithner and I recommend that everybody in the Oireachtas read it. As a result of this article, I have been asked to put a few specific questions to the Minister for Education and Skills and I would be very grateful if the Leader would convey these questions to him. The questions are as follows. How many special needs assistants are employed by the Department? How many special needs assistant whole-time equivalents are being used by our schools? How many special education teaching hours have been allocated, but go unused by our schools? I ask the Leader to note that I do not ask what resources have been allocated, because we know those figures, but what resources are applied, because there appears to be a disconnect between what has been allocated officially and what has been applied. There is a suspicion in some quarters that this a form of stealth cutback. May I have clarification in this regard?

I would like to mention with respect the awful injustice perpetrated on Fr. Reynolds. As I mentioned yesterday, one of our first priorities, not just in RTE but across the entire public service, except in cases where there is a personal issue, should be to ensure that gag orders cannot be applied when the State makes any kind of a settlement with anyone injured by the State. Time after time in the health service, I have seen gag orders applied, a quiet payment being made and the people in authority who made the error getting away with it. The question we must ask as we go forward to investigate what happened in this case is whether as a country we have suffered from having too much or too little investigative journalism. The answer is pretty obvious. Over the past ten to 20 years, we have had a complete shortage of appropriate, terrier-like investigative journalism of the kind which might have uncovered problems here before they became insoluble. We must not try to turn the press, the watchdogs of the people, into poodles.

With regard to proposed amendments to the Order of Business, I would take suggestions on the Order of Business much more seriously if I felt that Members were using the time we spend in this House more productively if they were not getting involved in endless procedural wranglings. If we had a little more discipline and tried to pretend this was not a kindergarten food fight between two spoiled children most of the time, we would get through the Order of Business within the allocated time.