Seanad report: Arguing that the performance of secondary schools should be "benchmarked", Mr Brian Hayes, Fine Gael leader in the House, said he realised he was raising a thorny issue that teachers and many people in the educational establishment did not want to address.
The recent OECD report on education had compared this country's performance with other national systems. It was a fundamental hypocrisy that we would not extend that principle to our own schools system and this needed to be challenged. Mr Hayes, who was contributing to a debate on the report, said he believed that Irish parents wanted to see exactly how their children's schools were performing. "I say that because we need to establish what is best practice. Unfortunately, our education system is dominated by a view that everyone gets the same amount of funding. I believe that funding should be directed to those schools that are failing."
These schools should have extra support, and if that meant having some kind of objective criteria on performance, then so be it.
Ms Joanna Tuffy (Lab) said she had been glad to hear the Minister of State for Education and Science, Mr Lenihan, state that the figures contained in the report did not provide a case for cutting back on third level - rather they pointed up a need to devote relatively more resources at primary level, especially in cases of disadvantage. That seemed to be a shift in terms of Government policy, because when the issue had last been raised, the Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, had indicated that his intention was that the money saved by the reintroduction of third-level fees would be invested in primary and secondary education.
Meanwhile, Mr Terry Leyden (FF) said he wanted to see the Hanly report on medical staffing binned as quickly as possible. "As far as I am concerned, we fought for and we have a hospital in Roscommon. I signed a contract for about €8 million for an accident and emergency department there, which is under construction. We have appointed an accident and emergency consultant, and it will be over dead bodies, politically or otherwise, that we will close that before it is opened.
"I want to see this report binned as quickly as possible and shelved and gather dust, because we will fight to hold Roscommon and we're going to win. We rejected the Fitzgerald report in 1968 and we're going to reject the Hanly report in 2003."