Fianna Fail are vandalising our education system
Issued : Wednesday 29 October, 2008
Speech by Ruairi Quinn TD
Minister for Education and Skills
On October 14th 2008 I sat in this chamber ready to hear the Minister for Finance deliver his first budget speech. I was anxious for him and the country. I remembered how I felt in February 1995, when I delivered the first of three budgets, as we launched the Celtic Tiger.
The budget is a complex and demanding task. I feared for a man, manifestly clever but with so little ministerial experience and no business background. My heart sank as I heard the civil service leaden prose being invoked to raise the nation to confront the new difficult economic circumstances in which we found ourselves.
This was no personal manifesto, political script or even plan of action that might lead us back to a productive and healthy economy. My worst fears were confirmed when I heard the cynicism and cowardice behind the call to 'patriotic action'. This is the last refuge of a worn out government too long in office and long out of creative solutions.
It was hard on Budget Day to fully grasp the budget's impact on our education system, from junior infants to post graduate students, but not now. The details have been revealed; the impacts have been measured; the results have been assessed.
Budget 2009 is little more than an act of Social Vandalism. It is an attack upon our children, the most vulnerable in our society. It is an attack on our future because our children will be the generation who will guide us into old age. They will care for us as we have done for our parents. It is an attack on our young generation. It pushes many shy, insecure young four year old children into classes with more than 30 other children.
It makes it impossible for under-resourced primary school teachers to cherish all the children equally. How can they find the time or make the space to monitor and guide each child? Where, amidst the demands of curriculum and time, will they get the moment to realise that a child - your child or your grandchild - needs extra help or special time.
We have 450,000 primary pupils in our overcrowded schools. In twelve years time we will have as many as 650,000 according to the Central Statistics Office.
Our population is growing but we have no place to accomodate our young children in decent classrooms. Already we have 45,000 primary pupils in prefabs. We have recently learnt that we have 50,000 new homes lying idle in ghost hosuing estates. This is more than the two years supply that our growing households would require. Many were built withunnecessary tax incentives. Their physical presence is an empty monument to the incompetence of Fianna Fail; the economically illiterate policies of Finance Ministers McCreevy and Cowen; and the greed of the Galway Tent.
Bankers and builders fell over themselves to persuade their 'bought' political clients that the bubble could never burst. How wrong they were. They would not listen. As late as last June we were accused by the Taoiseach as talking down the economy.
In years to come children will ask their parents - who repeatedly and unquestionably supported Fianna Fail and the Greens, 'what did you do in the boom?', 'where did the money go?', why did I spend my 12 years in school in a prefab?'.
The world's economy is changing rapidly, even dramatically, before our very eyes. Economic and political power is shifting from the West - America, Europe and like minded countries - to Brazil, China and India. The 500 years of European dominance, of which we are an intrinsic part, is now being rebalanced. We live in a very competitive global economy and competition will increase. Our future, within the European Union, is the consolidation of our knowledge based economy and a society build on Fairness, Equality and Solidarity.
The Labour Party supports the National Skills Strategy which underpins the goal of a knowledge based economy. We need to increase our third level graduates from 55% of student population up to 72% by 2020. Today, the children of some of the social groups in our society are already there. The abolition of Third Level fees removed the final psychological and financial barrier for families whose parents had never gone to college.
Education is not free at any level. Ask any parent about that. But now, at least, it is accessible to all, at least until the Greens and Fianna Fail re-introduce fees. But remember this; the journey to third level starts in primary school. Between the ages of 4 and 15 all children must, by law, attend school. Their parents can be brought to court and fined if their children do not attend and participate in education.
In our primary schools, among the many skills that our children acquire, they learn to write and to read. In secondary school children read to learn, so as to successfully sit the junior certificate and leaving certificate, before moving on to college.
However, today, 19% of our children drop out of school after they reach 15 years of age. Most of those can neither read nor write. Minister of State Sean Haughey has reluctantly admitted to me in the Dáil that as many as 500,000 adults in Ireland, half a million, are functionally illiterate and that number is growing. Budget 2009 will accelerate that growth. Drop outs drop into unemployment, then long term unemployment or possibly even worse, self abuse, drug addiction or crime. Maybe all three.
The impact of this budget on our education system is simply disastrous. At a time of need for more investment we are disimproving a key measure in our educational system - the pupil / teacher ratio. As a consequence we are now heading to the bottom of the OECD league. The Celtic Tiger under the management of Fianna Fail and the Greens is facing relegation.
One and half million people will be directly affected by the measures contained in this pernicious budget, not once, but frequently, and with disastrous results. Children, students, parents and even grandparents will all be touched, damaged and wounded.
Minister Batt O'Keeffe said that the cutbacks would only last for two years. Wrong. For some they will be a life sentence. Minister, Ministers of State, members of Fianna Fail and the Green Party, think again. Labour is not trying to score political points. Nor are we trying to bring down this government in our motion tonight. We simply want to change that element of the budget that affects education.
We share the views expressed by the Chairperson of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Science, Green Party Deputy Paul Gogarty who recently said:
"I do not have to repeat what I have said about education being a building block for future prosperity and social cohesion and the collective failure of the body politic - Government and opposition - to give real commitments to education so that we may reap the real rewards, albeit in some cases beyond the narrow five year electoral cycle. Funding education pays back in so many ways. And making cuts in the wrong place can cause irreparable damage".
We are trying to secure our future and defend our children. Ireland is still a rich country, but is currently in economic difficulties. We can, together, overcome those difficulties by creative thinking, hard work and political leadership. But please, do not use our children's future to copper fasten your deeply flawed budget.
Ministers and Deputies in Fianna Fail and the Green Party it is time to go back to the drawing board.
