Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and compliment him on hitting the ground running when he was appointed Minister for Education and Skills. Thus far the signs have been good and I am not saying it to boost his chances as regards anything that may happen tomorrow. He has done a good job.

Equality of access has been discussed. Frankly, the nonsense of teaching religion in national schools must stop. Let me give an example. The other day I talked to a national schoolteacher who had prepared her class for First Holy Communion. Each time she tried to get her students to focus on religion, a little girl would say she wanted to talk about her dress or hairdo and the method to be used to travel to the church. On the day of the First Holy Communion the teacher looked around but there was no sign of the little girl in the church. She thought she must have fallen ill with excitement. When push came to shove the child did not show up. The students were instructed to wear their First Holy Communion gear to school to have a photograph taken. The little girl arrived in school with her hair beautifully done. The teacher said, "Oh my God, Julie, you were not at the church on Saturday. What happened?" The girl replied that her mum had booked a hairdresser to call to the thei house but they arrived late. When the girl's hair had been done, the family were too late to attend the church and went straight to the hotel. What does that say about our view of religion and where we are going? It is time we kicked the practice aside and stopped the nonsense and did what I saw happen in Finland when I visited a school there two years ago. The trip around the school included a talk about fitness and well-being. I was told that, regardless of the weather, the children spend every Monday in the forest behind the school. Another Senator and I were assigned a 12-year old kid to show us the resources available in the school. As we walked up the stairs to the music room, the child stopped dead at the middle of the stairs, turned around and said: "I am terribly sorry, Senators, but I should have asked you how Ireland was coping with the crisis?" I asked him to what crisis he was referring. He said he had meant the economic crisis. I replied that I was delighted to report that we were recovering. He said that gave him great faith because Finland would have to cut its budget in the following three years and that if Ireland could recover, Finland could. He smiled and trotted off towards the music room. When we reached it, I told him that his English was extremely good, for which he thanked me. I asked him whether he also spoke Swedish. He said he spoke Swedish, Finnish, German and English but that his Russian was bad. In the light of Brexit and our commitment to the European Union, we would be better off teaching children here coding, as mentioned by Senator James Reilly, and languages. If people want to have their children taught religion, I suggest they attend Sunday school or that time be provided after the school day when a religion teacher could teach the subject. That is my view on national schools.

I want to talk to the Minister about further education. As a former president of the Teachers Union of Ireland, I was hammered for making the following suggestion.We have the finest further education institutions in the country, catering for some 30,000 teachers, and yet we close them every summer and in the evenings unless there are evening classes. The McIver report, which was published in 2004, provided for the opening of further education colleges for the 12 months of the year from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. We can revisit that model and start making those colleges work for the general good. We were talking about third-level colleges and how well they are doing. We have a huge attrition rate because we have devalued apprenticeships and we have devalued further education. As someone who came through further education rather late in life I have tremendous respect for what goes on in those colleges, and I would ask that we might at some stage reinvigorate the ideas in the McIver report and have those colleges open late in the evening 12 months of the year.