I move:
Go ndeontar suim bhreise na raghaidh thar £6,925 chun íoctha an Mhuirir a thiocfidh chun bheith iníoctha i rith na bliana dar críoch an 31adh lá de Mhárta, 1930, chun na gCostaisí a bhaineann le Ceárd-Oideachas.
That a supplementary sum not exceeding £6,925 be granted to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1930, for the Expenses connected with the Technical Instruction.
This is a Supplementary Estimate in connection with sub-head (E) of the Technical Instruction Board— Attendance Grants. It is impossible to estimate quite accurately the amount that has to be paid in attendance grants during the year, because it depends on the number of people who avail of these technical instruction schemes. As to the type of classes that they attend, in some classes the attendance grant is higher than in other classes; it also depends on the regularity of the attendance. For a number of years, the Department rather overestimated the amount of money that would be spent on technical instruction. They expected more to be spent than actually was spent. In the year 1926-7, the actual amount of the Estimate was £65,875 for attendance grants, and of that sum £4,169 remained unexpended. In 1927-8, out of a sum of £71,585 voted, there remained unexpended a sum of £5,536. With the admonition from the Public Accounts Committee and also with these figures in mind, we thought last year that it would be quite sufficient to estimate the expenses to be met this year at £70,000. But the recent returns have shown that our expectations were not fulfilled. In some respects they were more than fulfilled—that is, from the purely educational point of view. In that connection, therefore, there is a necessary increase asked for. So that if you compare the amount of money spent on attendance grants this year as compared with last year, there is an increase of over £10,000 due to the causes that I have indicated. If you take 15 of the larger urban areas for technical instruction in the country, the increase in numbers from 1927-28 to the following year 1928-29 is from 15,484 to 18,375. The total class entries increased from 39,917 to 50,474. The aggregate attendance hours rose from 1,610,000 to 1,914,000. The increase of £10,000 is mainly made up from the very causes that I have just indicated.