LABOUR EDUCATION spokesman Ruairí Quinn claimed that the Department of Education cannot tell him how many prefabs are in the primary school system.
He urged the newly appointed Minister, Batt O'Keeffe, whose appointment he welcomed, to go back to the drawing board and look seriously at the crisis he had inherited.
"We cannot have, as The Irish Timeswas saying two days ago, an knowledge-based economy in the future, with millions going into third-level PhDs, if our primary schools are so decrepit that you still cannot tell me how many prefab classrooms we have in our system, 2½ months after I asked the question,'' he added. He was speaking during the resumed debate on the Fine Gael private members' motion to prevent 28 primary schools throughout the State from losing a teacher in the 2008/2009 school years because of a drop in enrolments.
Tom Hayes (FG, Tipperary South) accused the Government of failing young people.
"We have been witness to the cancellation of the summer works scheme; the Government taking parents to court to deny them education for their child with special needs; to parents and students subsidising schools to pay for heat, electricity and water charges,'' he said. Margaret Conlon (FF, Cavan-Monaghan) said there would be a net increase of 500 teachers this year.
"Five times as many schools are expected to employ an additional teacher due to an increase in enrolments,'' she added.
Ms Conlon accused the Opposition parties of engaging in "political opportunism'', adding that they wanted to give preferential treatment to some schools, with the knock-on effect of having no objective criteria for staffing.
Mary White (Green Party, Carlow-Kilkenny) said class sizes must improve, but for parties to single out the loss of a teacher in some schools, blatantly overlooking the nuances of teacher allocation decisions, was shallow.
