Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I thank the Senators for their constructive interventions on this point. I will respond to the query made by Senator Healy Eames. Before last year, when a teacher became supernumerary to the pupil-teacher ratio, PTR, in a particular school, they stayed on the panel and, in many cases, stayed in the original school. That luxury ended when we lost our economic sovereignty. Under the memorandum of understanding with the troika, not only must we reduce our current budget deficit to 3% of GDP by 2015, we must also reduce costs in the public service by reducing numbers. It is known in the jargon as the ECF, the employment control framework. Many Senators will have been lobbied last spring when employment concerns were rising.

We were given a flat indication and I compliment Mr. Martin Hanevy and Mr. Pat Burke in the Department of Education and Skills for the way in which they negotiated, under existing legislation, with a number of teachers who had become supernumerary and who, for the first time, could not be left on the panel and in the school but who became a barrier to the employment of new, young teachers. The reality was that no new teacher could be hired until we cleared the panel. That meant redeployment. I also thank some of the patrons who extended spaces for employment to teachers who had been teaching in schools of a different ethos. There are many positive lessons to be learned from what happened last year. The good thing for professional teachers coming into the education system is that due to growing demand, dealing with the ECF has been offset by the number of new demands for teachers.

Senator Healy Eames asked two specific questions. The first was about the Gaeltacht and gaelscoileanna. It would not be reasonable to impose upon a gaelscoil or a Gaeltacht school a person who manifestly was not qualified to perform the required functions. I will leave resolving that to the professionals in the area. I also do not think that somebody should simply be able to say: "I will only go here and not there", and so forth. There are rights and responsibilities. With regard to ethos, in some cases it will be a matter for an understanding patron, on the one hand, to accept a tolerant and diplomatically prudent teacher. The teacher's defiance, if there was to be defiance, in terms of not moving themselves from the panel into a new job would mean that some newly qualified teacher would not get their job.

Furthermore, and I have discussed this with professional colleagues in the Department, the words "consultation" and "agreement" are very simple words, but it can be strung over a long dispute as to what constitutes consultation and the extent of agreement. I would be happy to enter into discussions, in an IR framework, with the educational partners to get a general consensus on the definition and meaning of "consultation" and "reasonable agreement". Every time there is a dispute or every time somebody is affected, therefore, we would not have to start ab initio defining what we mean by consultation or agreement. However, I would sooner put it in the flexible framework of social partnership and a Croke Park type agreement, rather than inscribe it in statute law.