Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-07-08 ============================================================ Holly Cairns (SD), Cork South-West I do not know how the Taoiseach can stand up in here and say there is not a change when this is very clearly a huge change for schools, teachers and students, without engagement with them, without understanding of the impact and, seemingly, without even understanding the school calendar. If it were not so serious, it would be comical. The Government has failed to provide school places for hundreds of children, attempted to slash the number of SNAs in school and botched the roll-out of the summer provision, and the Taoiseach stands up here and tells everybody that things are going great. Given that schools are closed now, people thought they might get a break from this kind of mess, but no, here we are again. I will ask the other two questions that the Taoiseach did not answer again. Why was this announced when the schools are closed? Will the Government postpone the closure of the portal until at least the first week in October? --- 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/2026-07-08/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:07+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-08