Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Over the past week or two I watched a video from the Leader’s home town made by a family that was quite disgruntled. We are in the middle of an electoral cycle now and I have to say, for social media to publish such videos to attempt to damage politicians in their home towns is outrageous. It is something that the regulator or whoever needs to act on. It is grossly unfair to follow politicians and try to highlight them doing their job. That is all that the people in question did; their job. From my perspective, we need to cut that out, certainly coming up to an election. It needs to be stopped and it needs to be stopped now.

Senator Gavan brought up the issue of national school teachers. As the Cathaoirleach will know, we stopped employing secondary school teachers in full jobs back in 1996.We started hiring teachers on an hourly basis. Being totally honest, when I was president of the Teachers Union of Ireland I remember having one teacher who had one hour a day for five days. This meant they were not entitled to social welfare supplements. It is outrageous that anybody would do that. When the Cathaoirleach and I worked in teaching, we had full jobs. We went into jobs where it was up to the school to find the hours to fill the 22 hours a week and we found a way of doing it.

What has changed? The Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act 2003, which protects people in employment, works against teachers. I believe nurses and various other health workers suffer the same thing where they are employed hourly. From that point of view, we might have a debate on that with the Minister when we come back after the next election. We will probably have to wait a few months for that but I would be happy enough to do that, as, I hope, the Leader is. We might get around to it.