Educational Disadvantage
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-29
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Conor Sheehan (LAB), Limerick City

I thank the Minister for being here today. It is very rare that one gets the actual Minister when one raises a Topical Issue. We have the OSCAILT network in Limerick and 12 schools are identified in that. It is very similar in the north east inner city where we have the North East Inner City initiative that works with ten of the most deprived schools in the inner city and operates on the same principles as OSCAILT. My understanding is that those schools were all identified and included in DEIS plus.
I have a couple of follow-on questions. Will the Minister or the Department flag to principals in advance of next year the importance of updating their primary online database, POD, and post-primary online database, P-POD, before the DEIS plus assessment? Principals have a highly intensive work load and in many cases the POD may not have been updated in the fullest sense. Will the Department carry out a review on the roll-out of DEIS plus to look meaningfully at some of the issues I have raised around the rigidity of the application process? There is a school on the left hand side of the road in Limerick that has been included and meets the criteria as set out by the system but there is a school on the right hand side of the road that does not when it essentially serves the same population and has the same issues. One school has now been given a leg up while the other has, unfortunately, been given a kick back.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:08+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-29