PARENTS AND politicians, including a Government TD, staged a protest along with pupils over changes in the pupil/teacher ratio which are likely to herald the loss of a member of staff at a three-teacher school near Castlemaine in Co Kerry yesterday.
At the 49-pupil Fybough National School, at the gateway to the Dingle Peninsula, the recent budget decision to raise the three-teacher ratio in small schools to 51 will see it lose a teacher.
The protest took place after Christmas Mass at the school, celebrated by Castlemaine parish priest Fr Luke Roche. One placard held by a child read: “Dear Santa, this year save our school.”
School principal Angela Prendergast described the decision as “another stealth attack on the fabric of rural life”. She said the community was fully united in fighting the proposed cut.
William Evans, a father of two children in the school, said the loss of a teacher would have a serious impact on the education of the children and would be “a throwback to the days of the hedge school . . . You cannot have a situation where one teacher has four classes in the same room,” he said.
Kerry TDs Brendan Griffin (FG), Martin Ferris (SF), Michael Healy-Rae and Tom Fleming (both Independents) attended, as well as a number of county councillors.
Mr Griffin, who was an area councillor for Dingle, promised to fight for the school.
However Mr Healy-Rae afterwards accused him of “talking out of both sides of his mouth”.
“Brendan Griffin supported this mean budget, which is an attack on rural Ireland. It was a particularly mean budget and, with its closure of Garda stations, courthouses, small schools, and septic-tank charges, was nothing but an attack on rural Ireland.
“If my father Jackie Rae voted for cuts in his support for the previous government, he always made sure he came away with something in return for the people of this constituency, but now we have nothing only cuts,” Mr Healy-Rae said. Up to a dozen other schools in Kerry were going to be similarly affected, he said.