Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish to reiterate Senator Conway's remarks. I was the main speaker on holding history as a core subject in 2015. I cannot believe that the Senators are all congratulating themselves. It was an appalling decision by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, NCCA, which was capitulated on by the great Labour and Fine Gael Government. It actually thought about it. It was one of the most unedifying, uneducated decisions to take history as a core subject and make it into a discrete, non-core, non-compulsory short course choice, which is what the NCCA was doing. Instead of arguing the brilliance of the subject, it was listing formulaic verbs which it hoped anything and everything would fit into. Now we are running around congratulating ourselves that the Minister has had the wit to reverse it. He would not have been the Minister for Education and Skills had he not had the wit to reverse it. What the NCCA was doing was wholly unedifying, uneducational and ridiculous. Everyone knows that the world's history is the world's judgment. If young people do not know the world's history, they will not know how to judge it or themselves. We are reversing back on ourselves and, having listened to the NCCA, we are now congratulating ourselves on our decision.

This morning, I chaired a conference of Home and Community Care Ireland, HCCI, which includes organisations such as Home Instead. It was very edifying and a very illuminating event. It was attended by hundreds of people who work in the area. I wish to congratulate the Minister of State, Deputy Jim Daly, who was outstanding in his remarks about what we need, the amalgamation of services and independent living and the different aspects of independent living and on ageing in Ireland. I will be sorry to see him leave politics. In two years, he grasped a complete and absolute sense of what we need to keep people in their homes in a thousand different ways when they are able to do so. I wanted to congratulate him. I also hope that the healthcare assistants and all pertaining to homecare hours will be looked at very favourably in the budget, as it is the most pressing area of life in Ireland now.