Student placement - Crisis must not be repeated

It is perverse, to say the very least, that it took the personal intervention of Education Minister Noel Dempsey to ensure that Limerick schoolboys are to be eventually accommodated in second-level education.

The minister’s pragmatic approach has, happily, resolved a controversy which should never have arisen in the first place, and which left up to 20 young people in an educational limbo.

No doubt, the minister’s stated resolve to introduce regulations to overcome the continuing impasse, injected a measure of common sense locally.