The Government was leaving itself wide open to a legal challenge over the presence of untrained teachers in national schools, Joe O'Toole (Ind) warned.
"I believe that the requirement in the Constitution, that the State provide for free primary education, implies free professional primary education. Now that teachers are available there is no longer any excuse for not having fully-qualified and fully-trained teachers in primary schools".
The Minister for Education should discuss this with them, because he believed that it was only a matter of time before the Government faced a class-action on a constitutional basis, that it was not complying with this constitutional imperative.