Digital Divide and Back to School Costs: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-15
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Duncan Smith (LAB), Dublin Fingal East

I welcome to the Gallery former councillor Peter Coyle, a great servant to the Labour Party and Fingal local government for 20 years.
I thank Deputy Kenny for bringing forward this motion on behalf of the Labour Party and the majority of Deputies for their contributions to this debate today. I have to qualify that thanks as a couple of the Sinn Féin contributors chose to take a narrow, decontextualised view of Labour’s own record in education. To focus that lens on Sinn Féin, which held the education brief in Northern Ireland for 16 years, it was a time of multi-annual budget cuts, multiple fee and state exam increases and, indeed, redundancies of teachers and support staff. The charge made against us was that we have our best ideas in opposition. Maybe the charge against Sinn Féin is that it has its best ideas in the South because its record in the North in education is nothing short of disastrous.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-07-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:08+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-15