Educational Disadvantage
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-10
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Ciarán Ahern (LAB), Dublin South-West

To echo those comments, this is something that has joint political support across our constituency. We have worked constructively with the Minister of State before and we welcomed his engagement on the issues related to schools in Dublin South-West. DEIS plus is clearly very welcome and many schools in Dublin South-West have already benefited from it in the first round of applications. We are asking for this for St. Dominic's school which, as Deputy Murphy said, is a fabulous school in the heart of Tallaght serving 50 different nationalities. It already caters for two special classes and is opening an additional two in the coming year. It is a DEIS urban band 1 school, arguably one of the largest in the country, and is appealing the Department's decision not to include it in the DEIS plus first-round allocations. It has numerous reasons for doing that. Primarily, it seems that the methodology applied by the Department is very data-driven and is supposed to be objective, but possibly in sticking to so much data, some of the subtlety and the local knowledge are lost that would be involved in these kind of applications. What the school is saying is that the school itself and maybe the addresses of the students in the schools are not necessarily in the most deprived areas, strictly speaking, from a geographical point of view, including the conditions and situations in which the students are living and coming into the school.
The school takes from a very wide catchment, including from as far away as Citywest and the Citywest Hotel. Those students are in deprived situations and that data and that sort of subtlety are not captured by the Department's model. We are supporting the school's appeal for DEIS plus status and we would ask that the Minister of State would also give that significant consideration.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-06-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:47+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-10