Yes. The first thing I have to do, which is a pleasant duty, is to welcome the new Minister. I look forward to co-operating with him and criticising his actions, when necessary, hopefully for the benefit of education. It is ave and with every ave there is a vale. I must also, on this first public occasion in the Dáil, bid farewell to the Minister's predecessor, Deputy Burke, who is now a European Commissioner with nine countries, in some field at least, the object of his care.
I regret that since 1973 there has only been one full Estimate debate on Education. I also regret that White Papers, Green Papers and prelegislative documents on education were promised and that we have not seen any White Paper, Green Paper or pre-legislative document yet. With regard to the minutiae of the Supplementary Estimates I would like to say that when the Estimates proper came before the House I asked for the technicality of a token Estimate so that any debate would be on the broadest possible lines. However, these are actually termed Supplementary Estimates and this imposes certain restrictions on debate.
I am glad that the Minister has experience of business and commercial life, because this will help him in dealing with the hard-faced men of the Department of Finance, whose interference is visible in the Supplementary Estimates before us. With regard to Vote 29, I want to refer to the question of capital expenditure for Bord an Choláiste Náisiúnta Ealáine is Deartha. Perhaps the Minister might be able to refer to it in his reply. There was some trouble a few years ago in this regard. I want to know whether the money allotted some time ago for capital service in the National College of Art and Design has been spent.
In relation to Vote 30, as far as I can make out the document is a fraud. What we have is the transfer of £30,000 to a new subhead, C9, to cover those cases where school managers were caught for expenses incurred in the painting of schools just at the changeover from the old system to the new system of funding, and this is proper. In the document we have before us it says that subhead C9 was set up and £30,000 allotted. Underneath that it says: "Less the saving on subhead C5." Subhead C5 is the subhead which provides for the new system, that is the £6 per pupil to be supplemented by £1.50 per pupil by the local community. We voted for that under subhead C5, £3,800,000.
I understand that £3,800,000 minus £29,990 will not be spent and I want to know if I am right in that deduction. If all of that money is not being spent, this document is misleading. The document appears to say that £3,800,000 will be spent on the operating costs of national schools except for £29,990 which is the saving mentioned in this document. I want to know if this is true. Am I right in thinking that almost another £500,000 is being taken off that sum? Obviously the Minister for Education, knowing that we are in an inflationary situation, felt that £6 in 1975 should be increased for 1976, because there were two burdens of inflation, roughly 20 per cent and 18 per cent. If the grants were increased per capita by £1, which would be roughly 16 per cent, it would bring the 1975 figure roughly up to the figure that we passed in the Estimate earlier this year.
I think the cold, clammy hands of the Department of Finance got at that subhead. This is why I am hopeful that the Minister will set his stern face against this type of thing, because the people who are heating, painting and maintaining schools have to live with inflation. If this subhead is being raided not merely for the £30,000 under the new subhead C9 but by £500,000, I would oppose this and even make the House vote on it. Everybody knows that that type of operating cost—fuel, painting, and so on—is increasing. Everybody knows that inflation this year is 18 per cent and last year was about 20 per cent. I would like to compliment the forward budgeting of the Department of Education. I regret that, if money had to be got from the Education Estimate, this fund had to be raided. I submit that this page here does not show the truth and that the facts are not here.
Another possible use rather than an all-round £1 per pupil increase would be a positive discrimination in favour of the smaller schools, which are finding it very difficult to cope on the grant. I get letters and every rural Deputy gets letters about the difficulty of small schools who got £6 or £240 altogether, plus £1.50 or £60, to do this kind of job properly. There could be discrimination in favour of these schools to make it possible for the management to keep them adequately. I look forward to hearing the Minister's comment on that. I think I am right in my interpretation of it. If I am right, it is a disgrace. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is not an exercise that should commend itself to any Department, least of all to the Department of Education.
On Vote 31, Secondary Education, the Minister said there has been a saving on capitation grants of £762,000 and a saving of £470,000 on grants in lieu of fees. I cannot understand this. Secondary schools financing is difficult at the moment and parents are asked to help because State finances are inadequate. It strikes me it would not require an unnecessarily high level of ingenuity on the part of the Department to be able to spend on the schools the savings of £762,000 and £470,000 respectively. They know perfectly well that money is needed. If they have children going to school they know that the schools, not for the sake of just gathering in money, are asking parents to make voluntary contributions.
There is a saving of £60,000 on science grants. The activities of the savers are more than sinister. Here one would have thought that it would not take any great ingenuity again to be able to dispense this money to the schools to improve the subjects covered by these grants.
I come now to something that I mentioned before. It is yet another saving under subhead A.4—Grant for Irish and Bilingual Schools. The original estimate was for £110,000. The saving is £75,000. I am very angry about this one. It is a nitpicking operation. I would hope there is not, although there are people who are very suspicious about this, any anti-Irish trend developing. I ask the Minister to be sensitive on that point when he is administering his new office. I ask him to squash any such trend if he finds it. The schools in question saw the original estimate and they spent the money thinking they would get the amount specified because of their special status. They are now in a parlous position. When the Department of Finance came down, as it obviously did, like a ton of bricks on education the Department should have told them, in certain aspects anyway, to go to hell, that they were maintaining the original estimate. This one should certainly have been maintained. These schools have their own difficulties. I know because I worked in one of them. They have difficulties about textbooks and varying standards in the pupils. Sometimes they have to pay more money to bring pupils up to the required standard. It is nothing short of a disgrace that this particular estimate was tampered with, substantially tampered with, and there is a grave moral obligation on the Minister and his Department to see to it that the cut is restored with all possible speed.
Tá ceist ar an gClár agam mar gheall air seo agus is dócha go mbeidh an tAire ag caint tamall fada ar an gceist sin ag Tráth na gCeist inniu. Tá súil agam go mbeidh freagra sásúil aige don Teach agus dúinn go léir ar an gceist sin.
Subhead D deals with the publication of Irish textbooks. Here, again, there is a saving of £30,000. I raised here before the question of an Irish publication of high quality and considerable magnitude for which I think the Department has a certain moral responsibility because the person who was publishing it was led to believe there would be Department of Education support for it. He spent a good deal of money on the venture. He employed secretarial staff and so on. I mention this because I am slightly suspicious when something gets the hammer in an area in which there is a particular interest in the Irish language.
We had a considerable quarrel here about the drop in courses for teachers and I am glad to see the money was increased. I regret to say there is a slight reduction in it again now. It is called a saving. It is reminiscent of the loss of an organ in an operation. The whole operation is the Department of Finance giving orders to the Department of Education and, as a result of those orders, the Department of Education has to cut off vital limbs from its own service.
Subheads H.1 and H.2 deal with comprehensive and community schools. I am glad the Minister said there was no thought or conviction on his part that these schools should not be built and developed but there is a serious so-called saving on subhead H.2 of £700,000. The saving under subhead H.1 is £35,000. I am reluctant to use the word "saving" because it is not necessarily a saving. It is something taken away which would not be taken away because it was necessary and needed where it was. On subhead H.2 there is a saving of £700,000. The Minister referred to this. This whole business of saving on capital costs should be examined on a broader level.
I am confined to my brief here. In the most recent Central Bank report it was pointed out in regard to capital expenditure—and that is what we are dealing with here—that the Minister for Finance envisaged a 24.4 per cent increase for 1976, and at the end of September it was 1.2. There seemed to have been a conscious Government decision to cut capital expenditure, and we have been all the time in this House demanding the kind of expenditure that was creative. In a situation where unemployment is so high and the employment content here is so high, in the building of schools and so on, it is nothing short of a tragedy that this cutting of capital services should take place in the Department of Education, apart altogether from capital expenditure which is actually needed, and needed as a bare minimum for the running of a school.
Let me give an example to the House, and it is relevant to subhead H.2 here. There is a comprehensive school in Cootehill in my own constituency. There has been a refusal to replace staff. Tiles in the roof of the gymnasium or assembly hall—it is one of these multi-purpose halls which can be used for physical education, drama and so on—were removed because, being flimsy, they were damaged. They have not been replaced. There are huge unprotected lamps hanging dangerously out of the ceiling. Furthermore, there is no adequate playing pitch at this school. Two basketball courts were promised and they have not been provided. A plot of land is required for the adequate teaching of agricultural science, again capital expenditure which is necessary for the proper running of the school. Equipment for the biology laboratory is necessary. There was an additional room which was supposed to have a partition which would enable the people organising the classes to conduct two classes or one class when it suited. The partition was not provided. The school is looking for these things. The parents have contacted me about these things. There should be no question of snooping around looking for a place to cut off a few pounds when essentials like that are required for a school. I could go on and on, but I want to indicate that there has been an attack made on education and it will have to be repulsed; otherwise education will become very much the poor relation in Government expenditure.
I referred in passing to the employment content. There are many people looking for jobs. Here are areas where jobs could be provided, where services would be supplied to schools and people could be earning money providing the roofs, pitches, basketball courts and so on.
There is no mention at all of vocational education, and I am very sorry that there is not. I have had letters recently from the students in Bolton Street who say their classes have had to be suspended there because teachers have not been appointed. All the metalwork teachers who were trained last year have not yet got jobs, although there have been vacancies in schools for metalwork teachers that have not been sanctioned. Again this is a serious position for education.
On Vote 34 which is mainly concerned with An t-Udarás um Ard Oideachas, I would like to hear something from the Minister about what he conceives to be the role and function of the Higher Education Authority. I have no up-to-date information —I am not blaming the Minister necessarily for this—about what is going on in education from reports by the Department. This problem will have to be faced and faced fairly soon, because always the reports were very late coming out. There will have to be adequate staff so that reports can be got quickly from the Department.
What set me musing about that was that some people were puzzled about what the Minister conceives the role and function of the Higher Education Authority to be. The 1971 Act set that out very carefully. During the summer the Minister for Education set up a committee which had representation from the Higher Education Authority to do a job that I would have thought was proper to the Higher Education Authority itself. The Higher Education Authority issued a number of very useful and well researched reports, and I am hoping it has not been downgraded. Again I am only surmising from what is happening; I do not know whether the fact that the Minister set up a different committee to help to draft the new Higher Education Authority legislation and that the Higher Education Authority did not get that job to do means the Minister is losing confidence in the authority. I am wondering whether they were consulted as such. I know they had representatives on this new committee while it was deliberating. I am just wondering if they will be consulted as the authority with the role and function outlined in the Act of 1971 and if they will be consulted before the Bill is circulated.