School Funding
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-11
============================================================

Darren O'Rourke (SF), Meath East

I thank the Minister of State for those figures, but they paint a picture that is a very stark one in terms of the financial challenge schools are going through. Regarding those numbers, we are not at Christmas yet and we have 18 schools referred to the FSSU so far this year and nine that have needed advanced payments. A number of schools, including Darver in neighbouring County Louth, have been high-profile in terms of the financial challenge they are facing.
Regarding the Minister of State's figures on the capitation and the funding, schools are worse off in real terms because of the lack of a cost-of-living package this year. There is a net reduction in the funding for them when we take out the cost-of-living package. Will the Minister of State look at introducing a cost-of-living package for schools this year in light of the cost of energy, insurance and heating?

---

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/dail/2025-12-11/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-11