School Patronage
Dail Éireann — 2023-03-23
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Richard Bruton (FG), Dublin Bay North

Would the Minister not agree with me that some very basic design processes were absent? Give the notion of a rapid decision in a complex situation, this should have been allowed to be phased over a period. As there were no data, no surveys and no anticipation of what might be the views of parents, it ended up that one of the criteria used was the number of children opting out of religion being an indicator of preferences – that is clearly not an adequate indicator but that is what they were reduced to. There were also basic questions on feeder school arrangements. Each of these is within a planning area. The Department could look at the entire planning area and develop a more robust system that gives parents more confidence in the direction of challenge. This process needs to be seriously examined. It did not work in this instance and some of the design flaws could have been anticipated.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-03-23/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:43+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-03-23