School Costs
Dail Éireann — 2022-05-12
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Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (SF), Cork South-Central

People across the State are doing all they can to keep up with sky-high bills and runaway price increases. The cost-of-living crisis is not new and it has been going on in education for some time. The idea that we have a free education system at primary and post-primary levels is a myth. The Department of Education is one of the only Departments that has not put forward any serious proposals in recent months to tackle increasing costs within its portfolio.
I am not blown away by the Minister's answer. She instanced a five-year old circular, two pilot programmes and the expansion of DEIS, which is welcome but, ultimately, the vast bulk of families are not going to see any reduction in the multi-hundred euro bills and neither are they going to see any reduction in the bills of more than €1,000.
There is a programme for Government commitment to reducing the high cost of education and in particular to provide free schoolbooks. We are two years into the Government's term and, aside from the pilot programme the Minister referred to in a small number of schools, there is no progress towards free schoolbooks. Is this something the Government is going to deliver? How is it going to deliver it and when is it going to happen?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2022-05-12/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:50:26+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-05-12