Michael D'Arcy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There has been much talk about radical reform but I am concerned that many children will have been in the system for ten to 12 years and that some of them will have been well and truly abandoned by the time they get to the junior certificate. Senator Barrett spoke about primary education being the core while others spoke about teaching children to read and, once they are able to read, teaching them how to learn.

I am concerned about abandonment, which I have raised in this House on a number of occasions. I do not know how many schools there are in the State - I realise I am stretching beyond the remit of these statements but it is the only opportunity I will have to put this to the Minister - but a number of schools which should have DEIS status do not have it on the basis of legacy decisions going back to 2005. Those schools have all the social ills and difficulties required for DEIS status but they did not get the status for whatever reason. I do not want to get into a big debate about the gerrymandering that went on and who got what, about which the Minister knows and which happened mid-way through the previous decade.

What is the Minister going to do about it? He has the opportunity in the upcoming budget to do something about this. To do nothing would suggest he is not a reforming Minister. I put this to him in a particularly hard manner for one reason, namely, there is one of those schools in the area in which I live and which I have discussed with him. It is taking the same cuts as the schools in the leafy middle class suburbs which are capable of taking some, or most, of those cuts. The schools about which I am talking that should have DEIS status cannot take the cuts which have been, and may be, made. Something must be done in the budget in order that these schools are not ignored and abandoned.

There is social deprivation in this particular area, of which the Minister is aware, but this school is losing home-school-community liaison teachers and is taking the same cuts as schools in comfortable areas. That is reprehensible. Many plaudits were thrown at the Minister in this debate, and rightly so, but on this occasion, nothing has happened and I have been banging this drum for the best part of ten months. To say nothing happened is incorrect in that the cuts the schools were told were coming have all come. Those schools simply cannot absorb those cuts and reductions.

I hope the Minister will do something about it. I will not drop this issue and Senators will have heard me raise it on the Order of Business on several occasions. I will be the first person to support the Minister if he has to make other cuts in other areas because I know of the economic difficulty we face. I expect this to be cost neutral to the Department. If the Minister does this, he will have my full support even though there will be an impact on many other schools. The Minister and the Department must not be allowed to continue to abandon those schools that do not have but which should have DEIS status and which need something from him and his Department.