Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Yesterday, there was a briefing across the road from Leinster House with the education and training boards, ETBs, and it was attended by many colleagues. It was interesting to engage not just with Limerick and Clare ETB but other ETBs such as those in Galway and Cavan and to hear about the various challenges they face. Clearly, the cost of living is having an effect on their day-to-day services. We need to see an increase in funding for ETBs to take account of the various challenges they face, whether that relates to providing school meals or extracurricular activities and so on.

Furthermore, we need to take a common-sense approach to procurement. If an ETB needs to hire a bus to allow a school to attend a football match, it has to go through a centralised structure to hire that bus, even though there could be a young fella in the school whose father or mother owns a bus company, meaning it would work out cheaper. Centralised procurement is good in most cases, but there are certain situations where it is not. Similarly, if an ETB wants to take out an advert, it has to go through a centralised advertisement process to get one into the local newspaper instead of being able to contact the local newspaper or radio station directly, book the advert and pay for it. Of course, there could be guidelines such that if an ETB were taking out an advert, depending on circulation, it could cost only within a certain price range.

We could put a structure in place whereby there would be oversight, accountability and so on, but we need a little common sense when it comes to our local schools retaining local services provided by people in the community for young people living in the community. A local bus service might wish to take out an advert in a school musical, whereas if it is done centrally, there could be an outcome such as that in Galway where a bus will have to travel from the city to take students from, say, Clifden to a match 15 km up the road before returning to the city. From every perspective, including environmental, we need to take another look at that structure.