Feargal Quinn (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Recently the Minister for Education and Skills referred to the amount of time allocated to teaching religion in schools. I believe, however, he has been misquoted in many cases because he did not suggest the solution was to reduce the amount of hours allocated for the teaching of religion. We have a real problem in that over many years we have developed a shorter school time period than any other country in the world. In Japan schools have 16 days holidays per year; in Germany there are six weeks holidays in the summer. However, we got into a habit of having shorter school times. One of the reasons for this was children were needed to work during the summer on farms 60 or 100 years ago. The result was that the second level system ended up with three months holidays during the summer.

There is another month at Christmas, another month at Easter and another month at mid-term as well. It seems to me that part of our problem is that we have not allocated enough time for education. I know it will not be easy to convince teachers to work a lot longer. It appears to me that with the challenges we have, it is not so much that too much time is allocated to religion but that not enough time is allocated to such subjects as languages, maths, English and history. The question is how we find time to do that. The only way to find is a solution is by devising something novel. I urge that we consider that. It would be worthwhile having a debate on education, not just on the question of religious education but on how we will manage to solve the problem with education, because there is a real challenge to our country in the future in terms of how to educate the next generation. We cannot fit it into the limited number of hours we have. To the best of my knowledge, we have the shortest number of hours devoted to education in the world. That is worthy of discussion in the near future.

I know we debated Irish Water last week and on occasions in recent weeks but what has come out since last week is worthy of mention. I refer to 4,500 local authority employees being taken on when Irish Water already has 1,700 employees. It does not need 4,500 staff. I do not know how we can solve this. I am not sure what the solution is. It has been said that the issue will resolve itself within 15 years but we cannot wait that long. If there is a scandal waiting to break, similar some of the scandals we have had in recent times, this is the one. We really need to debate it now rather than wait until it is too late to do something about it. We need a debate again on Irish Water, particularly in light of the new figures coming through. I would especially like to see a debate on education, particularly on the amount of time allocated to education for children.