Literacy and numeracy are often ignored in the debate about up-skilling and retraining. Not being able to read or count is often an enormous obstacle to any person who finds themselves unemployed and looking for new work.

Illiteracy is one of the biggest causes of inequality in Ireland’s society and economy. Without the ability to read or count, people cannot find work, access public services or avail of education. The personal cost of illiteracy is isolation, poverty, and disenfranchisement.  The societal cost, and cost to the economy as a whole, is profound.

I am calling on the government to engage with stakeholders and to set a timetable for a new strategy for adult literacy. Literacy and numeracy should become compulsory components of all training and up-skilling programmes and encourage people to make contact with their local adult education services.

The recent controversies in FÁS have completely destroyed any public confidence in the organisation and there is a widespread perception that the agency is unable to cope with the massive unemployment crisis Ireland is currently facing. The FÁS brand has lost credibility.

The state training agency should be fundamentally reviewed and the retraining budget should be put into the Vocational Education Committees and the Institutes of Technology instead.

15,000 additional students are attending primary school in our overcrowded and under-funded education system since last year’s survey was published.

This is the real evidence of the government’s strategy to repeatedly cut public spending. Fianna Fáil have not only wrecked the economy, they are seriously damaging our education system too.

We know there is a massive increase in the natural birth rate of children and that the capital budget for school buildings is being under-spent. The outlook for children starting school this week is very bleak.

As I warned twelve months ago, the only certainty in education is that there will be even larger class sizes for many years to come.

There was a good Labour presence at the event and speeches by a number of Labour TDs illustrate the reforms Labour would deliver if in government.

Eamon Gilmore’s speech set out his long-term vision for a New Republic, Pat Rabbitte’s talked about meangingful and effective political reform, while Sean Sherlock presented a vision of what geunine public sector reform should be.

Labour has the ideas, the vision and the policy to make Ireland a better place and to generate a recovery in our economy and our society.

Have a read and see for yourself.

In page 4, lines 29 to 31, to delete all words from and including “may” in line 29 down to and including “section” in line 31 and substitute the following:

“may not dispose of any land (including buildings) vested in it by this section and must continue to use the land (including buildings) vested in it by this section for medical purposes related to the treatment of cancer in public patients in a manner and form determined by the Executive with the consent of the Minister”.

I am sorry to say that Fianna Fail and the Green Party voted it down by 70 votes to 66.

The Bill has now been passed and the HSE will assume control of St. Luke’s Hospital. The Government has said it will implement the closure of St. Luke’s in 2014, but it could happen at any stage.

I am very disappointed that the Minister for Health, Mary Harney TD, has not listened to the many supporters of St. Luke’s hospital.

You can read my Report Stage speech in full below.

Deputy Ruairi Quinn:

Amendment No. 3 in my name and that of my colleague, Deputy Jan O’Sullivan, states:

In page 4, lines 29 to 31, to delete all words from and including “may” in line 29 down to and including “section” in line 31 and substitute the following:

“may not dispose of any land (including buildings) vested in it by this section and must continue to use the land (including buildings) vested in it by this section for medical purposes related to the treatment of cancer in public patients in a manner and form determined by the Executive with the consent of the Minister”.

To translate that into vernacular English, we want to hold on to St. Luke’s as a centre of cancer excellence; we do not want it to be sold.  If the Minister wants to sell it, she or her successor will have to bring such a proposal back to this House and make a persuasive case for it.  It is pretty simple.

The Minister of State is not the senior Minister responsible and therefore he is not accountable for undertakings given by the Minister verbally in the Chamber.  Any verbal undertaken given by any Minister in any Administration is not worth the paper it is not written on.  For the Government to suggest, with the arrogance that only a tired Administration can command faced with an election in 2012, that it will not implement a decision in 2014 makes Robert Mugabe look like a reluctant tyrant.  Let us be realistic.

This Administration will not form the next Government, according to all the opinion polls.  To suggest instinctively, that Deputy Harney as Minister would give a verbal undertaking that the Government would not be disposed to do as we seek indicates the reason for the Government parties’ rankings in the polls and why the Minister’s party has disappeared.

I attended the opening of Lios na nÓg, a Gaelscoil in Cullenswood House last Monday.  I persuaded the Minister of State’s colleague, Deputy Treacy, when he was junior Minister with responsibility for the Office of Public Works, in 1987, after much argument and debate, not to proceed with the firesale of Cullenswood House.  As the Minister of State may recall it was the birthplace of Scoil Éanna, the birthplace of the Gaelscoil movement and the birthplace of the school that Pádraic Pearse established in Oakley Road for the teaching of young people through the medium of Irish in the early part of the 20th century.

The then Minister of State, Deputy Treacy, listened to the arguments I put to him, namely, that this was a dilapidated building in poor condition.  The Office of Public Works then faced similar economic constraints and firesale conditions, although the conditions were not as bad as those now faced by the Minister of State’s Department and the Government.  I advised the then Minister of State that the building was a building site and that little or no money would be secured from its firesale and that it would become an apartment block of anonymity and privacy.  He was persuaded by my argument.

Through a long process of preservation, consultation and gestation, having regard to the original purpose for which the building  was preserved or held on to by the Cullenswood House committee, the building was transposed into the provision of a new

Lios na nÓg school beside Scoil Bhríde, which was one of the original Gaelscoileanna in this country.  President McAleese had the honour of opening that school less than ten days ago.  If the then Minister of State, Deputy Treacy, had not had that courage, which I hope the Minister of State possesses, we would not have had that celebration less than ten days ago.  This building would probably become an anonymous, badly built, speculatively constructed, apartment block, something of which Ranelagh does not need more.

We have been told nothing will happen for another four years, until 2014.  The property market will probably have recovered in part by then but our economic circumstances will remain difficult.  The temptation to sell off this property in Dublin 6, as my constituency colleague, Deputy Lucinda Creighton, will concur, will be strong.  If it were to be sold off and the proceeds transferred to the Health Service Executive which would then provide an equivalent facility of the same quality in another location, I would be somewhat open minded though still not persuaded.  However, the idea of handing over that haven of calm, as one speaker described it on Second Stage, to the chaos of the HSE is beyond belief.

The Minister of State’s party will not be in government in four years’ time.  He must not allow this facility to become the bureaucratic entitlement of the Department of Health and Children or the HSE, which is accountable to nobody.  In the case of the Department, we can at least see our public servants in the Chamber today.  Under the old system, some of us were members of health boards, possibly including the Minister of State, Deputy Moloney.  However, the HSE is like the KGB, with public representatives never seeing or meeting with its officials.  They do not answer our questions and are entirely unaccountable.

If this legislation is passed in its current form, St. Luke’s Hospital is gone.  If the Minister of State does not accept the Labour Party amendment, this vital facility is doomed.  Can he name another hospital anywhere in the country that could evoke the same degree of emotion, sympathy and support which the Friends of St. Luke’s Hospital have been able to mobilise?  It is not simply a question of a feel good factor, as many mothers of children born in certain maternity facilities feel good about the process of having given birth there.  We are talking about something much more substantial.  We are talking about people who went through a journey which they may or may not have survived.  They and their families attribute their survival, or the calm acceptance of the alternative outcome, as being greatly assisted by the calm environment of St. Luke’s Hospital.  Yet the Minister is going to substitute it for St. James’s Hospital.  We are going to transpose St. Luke’s Hospital and everything that surrounds it into the facility off St. Stephen’s Street.  Who is in charge here?

Once state-of-the-start medical practice has measured and identified what is wrong with an individual patient – Deputy Reilly is more familiar than I with what is involved in that – the course of therapy is outside the narrow confines of measured medical interventions.  There are other factors that cannot be measured but which contribute to the recovery or palliative care of patients.  Just because we cannot measure them does not mean they do not exist.  That immeasurable quality exists in St. Luke’s Hospital, yet the Minister of State is going to let the HSE flog off the facility even though his party will not even be in government when it happens.

The Minister of State will regret, when he is in opposition in four years’ time, that he did not have the courage to say he did not agree with the permanent officials of the

Department of Health and Children or the monster that is the HSE.  A future Minister will have to come into this Chamber in 2014, stand where the Minister of State is standing today and persuade the House that it is a good idea.  It is certainly not a good idea in 2010.  Why is the Minister of State ceding to people in the HSE – people who never have to face election or accountability of any kind – the power to destruct a facility that has won the hearts and affections of hundreds of people throughout the State?  For whom and for what is that being done?  It is mind blowing.

We have not made a success of the reorganisation of our health services; everybody in the House would agree with that.  There is much work to be done.  I am advised by people who know far more than I about the mechanics and science of medicine that national centres of excellence and the centralisation of cancer services is the best way forward.  I do not dispute that, but the reality is that we do not know everything.  What we do know, however, is that St. Luke’s Hospital works.  Why impose a death certificate on this cancer treatment facility, which is what the Bill will do if our amendment is not accepted?  It is a death certificate with a time stop of four years.

I have collected four boxes of petitions, which will be delivered to the Minister’s office, from people throughout the country.  Deputy Creighton will concur that this is not simply a constituency issue.  St. Luke’s Hospital is a national institution which happens to be located in the constituency of Dublin South-East, and the vast majority of the people who have petitioned me and Deputy Creighton do not live in the constituency.  This is not parish pump politics; it is a question of national solidarity with an institution that works and whose existence has evoked an extraordinary loyalty.  Yet the Minister of State wants to destroy it.  I urge him to accept our amendment.  If necessary, the Minister,

Deputy Harney, can introduce the change in the Seanad.  I ask the Minister of State to do a “Noel Treacy” on this and save St. Luke’s Hospital.

Deputy Ruairí Quinn: This is the second time in my political lifetime in this Chamber that I have seen the Fianna Fáil party bring this country to the verge of bankruptcy.  I sat on these benches in 1977 when the triumphant Jack Lynch came in with his manifesto of economic illiteracy that believed we could borrow our way into the future in other people’s currencies.  That economy collapsed amid its own contradictions when Jack Lynch was ousted two years later.  Then there was Mr. Haughey, clinging to power for reasons we now understand, literally giving money to everybody and anybody.

For those of us who are old enough to remember and for those of us who still have the scars, the crawl back through three general elections between 1981 and 1982 was a difficult time for everybody, but we did crawl back.  Slowly but surely, through that very difficult period in the 1980s, we tried to get the country back on its feet again.  It was not just people on this side of the House who did that; people on that side of the House tried as well.  They recognised that mistakes had been made and they had the honesty to recognise them and to deal with them.

When we went into Government with Fianna Fáil in 1992 and left in 1997, I had the honour of being Minister for Finance.  I had the responsibility and the courage to ensure that we would not try to buy the next election.  As a consequence, the Taoiseach and his colleagues inherited the first planned surplus in over 30 years and the most competitive economy in Europe at that time, creating 1,000 jobs a week, with unemployment rapidly falling.

The 1997 to 2010 period should have been a wonderful period of prosperity, of shared opportunity, of modest and prudent investment, but the Government blew it and I can give one iconic example of this.

One hundred years ago in this city and across the country, children were getting out of overcrowded tenement buildings in urban Ireland and poorly built thatched cottages in rural Ireland, with no running water, no decent construction, dampness and cold in the winter and walking to school, where they were housed and educated in classrooms that were in state-of-the-art buildings at that time.  The Taoiseach knows them because they are part of our rural landscape.  Those children got the best and were educated in the best physical surroundings that were available to them; better than anything they lived in at home.

If we fast forward to today, the grandchildren of those people get up in warm beds in centrally heated houses, double glazed windows and patios, walk to their cars and are driven to school, where they are educated in prefabs.

A total of 100,000 children are currently in prefabs in this country, and that population is growing.  The children who are born tonight will be knocking on school doors in four years’ time.  As it takes the Department of Education and Science five years to process an application for a school extension, they will be knocking on the door of a prefab.

Why did this come about?  The money was there.  Fortunes were made.  Builders could not get enough people at home to work and they had to import labourers from everywhere else.  Money was not a problem and the frequent cry was “I do not care how much it costs, just how soon can it be built?”

I acutely remember listening to representatives from the chambers of commerce in Carrick on Shannon when they met me in a deputation in the spring of 1997 when I was on a visit to Sligo and Leitrim.  They told me they wanted the urban renewal scheme for Carrick on Shannon and I asked them what part of the town did they have in mind.  They told me I did not understand, that they did not want to discriminate within Carrick or between Carrick and the different villages and towns in Leitrim, but that they wanted Section 23 urban renewal for all of Leitrim.  I had to bite my lip.

If one goes to that part of the country today, one will see the prefab schools and the empty buildings.  The whole of the north Shannon region is a wasteland of buildings that will never become homes, because the Government of which the Taoiseach was a member, under Mr. McCreevy as Minister for Finance, gave that section 23 to the whole north Shannon basin.

The legacy of the Celtic tiger will not be the soundly built buildings in which our grandparents were educated, but buildings that we will have to plough back into the ground.  If ever there was such conspicuous, wilful and criminal waste, then this is but one example.  Time prevents me from citing many more, but we never heard one single word about the wasted money for a generation that will never come back again.  That money is gone, like the savings people had in bank shares which made up their pension.  These were prudent, middle class people who were at an age where they could not buy proper pension plans for themselves and were advised to put their money in banks.  They were not advised to do this for an appreciation of the shares, but for the dividend that was to be paid out.  They are now impoverished, and who do they think of when they look at the despair around them because they cannot sell buildings that have lost their value and they fear old age?

Does the Taoiseach appreciate or understand the deep seated anger, disgust and contempt in which the people hold him and his colleagues?  I had to go out to Glasthule this morning on personal business.  I was asked at the DART station there when I was going “to get them out”.  I was asked “how long more can we put up with them”.  There is palpable anger, disgust and a despair that does not affect just the Taoiseach and the Fianna Fáil Party.  It has infected us all.  The Government has contaminated the republican democracy that is enshrined in this Chamber.  As some Members of this House were crooked, contemptuous or lax in what they did, we have all been infected.  That is the virus that has become Fianna Fáil.  That is why it is unbelievable that the Taoiseach would even have the temerity to come into this House and ask that we vote confidence in him and his colleagues.  There is a litany of waste and contemptuous dismissal, as Deputy Dempsey showed by saying “What is €50 million?” for the voting machines that even Robert Mugabe would not buy.

Deputy Alan Shatter: He might.

Deputy Ruairí Quinn: That money would transform schools across the country and could be spent in so many different ways.  Yet it was piddling sum according to the Minister, or just petty cash.  The Taoiseach has treated taxpayers’ money as petty cash and he has the temerity now to seek confidence from us.

He spoke earlier about policies he has delivered and said that the Government is now on the right course.  How do we know we are on the right course?  Is it because The Wall Street Journal tells us?  How do we know that he is getting good advice or implementing it?  Why should we trust or have confidence that the people who have blown the boom will restore it back to some degree of credibility?

The Government Deputies will escape in four or five weeks into the summer, and I can see in all their faces and in the weariness of the responses to questions that they just cannot wait.  However, the people will not go away.  The Taoiseach just does not even have the courage to call three by-elections and because he does not have that courage, the children of this republic are not getting the referendum to which they are entitled.  This is happening not because of legal complexities or because the Government cannot afford the referendum, but because Government Deputies are so scared of their political futures that children of this nation are not being cherished equally.  They are not being cherished equally due to mean and miserable political cowardice that prevents the Taoiseach from going to the country.

The republican Oliver Cromwell gave advice to a decrepit, corrupt and now defunct government and parliament in Westminster many years ago.  I offer it to the Taoiseach:  “In the name of God, go”.

The Taoiseach: I am not corrupt, Ruairí.

The purpose of the Bill is to provide for the dissolution of Saint Luke’s Hospital Board in Rathgar, Dublin 6 and the transfer of its employees, assets and liabilities to the Health Service Executive.

I have used St. Luke’s in the past and know first-hand about the excellent service it provides to its patients.

You can read some of the coverage about my speech here.

You can read my speech in full here.

Funding has been repeatedly yet the number of students is still growing, particularly as high unemployment is driving the demand for upskilling and re-training.

The government have decided to either cap numbers attending third level or to allow our universities to decline in their quality of teaching.

Neither choice is ideal. Fianna Fail and the Green Party have inflicted serious damage on our higher education system by destroying the public finances.

Re-introducing third level fees is not a feasible option because they already exist in the form of the registration charge. Any revenues raised by higher fees will not be spent on higher education.

The National Skills Strategy calls for 72% of Leaving Cert Students to go on to third level by 2020. This is a welcome target but ring-fenced funding for education is required if the government wishes to meet this target. I suspect the government has already abandoned its commitment to a knowledge economy.

The Employment Control Framework has led to serious shortages of teaching staff in many Departments and universities have not been given the flexibility to replace staff. In some colleges, there are subjects that are no longer taught as they have lost all their teaching staff through retirement.

This Framework needs to be reviewed by the Minister for Education and Skills so as to allow university management allocate resources as they see fit.

However, the Minister’s comments are at odds with those of the Minister for Education and Skills, Mary Coughlan TD. The Tánaiste told me on the 20th of April, in a parliamentary question, (see below) that she has no plans to introduce Mandarin as a Leaving Certificate subject.

I would encourage the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Tánaiste to speak with one another about this important issue. The government needs to reconsider its position and examine the advantages of offering an exam in Mandarin.

I have visited schools in Ireland that are offering Mandarin. Many students will shun it unless they are given the opportunity to gain a recognised qualification at Leaving Cert level.

China is one of the fastest growing economies in the world and it is so important to encourage and develop trade links within Asia. This could give our education system and an important competitive edge over other European countries. This should be a priority, along with efforts to raise the quality of maths and science teaching in our schools.

I will be raising this matter with the Tánaiste in the Dáil next week.

This edition focuses on Education and sets out Labour’s Priorities for our schools and students.

There is also detailed local news from all parts of the Dublin South East constituency.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with me.