Further questions for government as Ryan found out about Leaving Cert issue on Friday

Transport Minister Eamon Ryan was told about the Leaving Cert grading issue five days before it was made public. Picture: Tom Honan/PA Wire

There has been further criticism of the government after Eamon Ryan admitted he found out about errors in the Leaving Cert grades last Friday.

The government and the Department of Education have been accused of lacking "transparency" after it emerged on Wednesday that the two errors, effecting 7,200 grades were identified a week previously. 

The Minister for Education was told on the morning of Wednesday, September 23, with Transport Minister Eamon Ryan told two days later, with the remaining members of the Cabinet not informed for a further five days. 

Speaking during leader's questions, Mr Ryan said the decision not to inform the public or politicians was in order to investigate what had gone wrong.

"There was no one kept in the dark of this," he said.

"The error, only became apparent when the person who'd actually been involved in the coding, saw a slight variation and decided to check and found out what had happened.

"The person was and is eminently qualified as a person who worked previously with Statistics Canada, the Canadian statistics body, but also had specific expertise with regards to the Irish academic system, because of work they've done here in assessing our Pisa results.

"It was very difficult to find people with such international expertise with reach real knowledge of the our system.

"On seeing the variation that occurred, they contacted the Department of Education's late last Tuesday week.

"Minister Foley was only informed on Wednesday morning, that there was a difficulty but not clear exactly what it was."

The CAO ran their second-round of college place offers on that day, which the government let go ahead, "because it wasn't clear what the error was," according to Mr Ryan.

"The department informed my party, myself on Friday," he added.

"We were informed on the details of it but at that stage, it was still, because it was a complex issue to look into, it was only still an initial sense of what the difficulty might be.

"I was fully informed or fully briefed on Monday in advance of a leaders meeting where we discussed it at length, and it's not keeping you in the dark but you can imagine if at the early stage of this process, if someone had gone out without full knowledge of what the actual consequences would be to the thousands of students that did the Leaving Cert, that would increase real anguish and uncertainty.

"It was only yesterday when it was cleared on the scale of issues, what the numbers were, the press conference was set for 4pm yesterday in advance of it being raised in the Dáil. There was no intention to keep anyone in the dark, but to try to get this right, so that those students actually the anguish was minimised and I think that was the right approach."

Minister for Public Expenditure Micheal McGrath told the Irish Examiner on Wednesday that he found out with the public, and the matter was not discussed at cabinet.

It's estimated over 6,500 students will be affected by the error which was caused by "four characters in 50,000 lines of code".