School Textbooks
Seanad Éireann — 2023-06-21
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John McGahon (FG), Cultural and Educational Panel

There are approximately 150 small independent bookshops right across this country. If we do not tinker with this scheme and fix it, it will push many of those bookshops, which are already operating on very fine financial margins, to the brink. If we can fix this scheme and tinker with it, with a couple of the suggestions I have made, it will make this a very profitable and very viable scheme for bookshops, and that is really what we want to do.
Alternatively, there is a good scheme in the Italian education system where the department of education provides book vouchers to the parents through the schools. The parents take those vouchers and use them in their local shops. That is a good scheme that ensures business is being kept in those towns. It takes away the concept of a tender process where there is a race to the bottom and a big company or group can take over that market. I would appreciate it if we could look at this and fix these few issues.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2023-06-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:02+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-06-21