Children caught up in grim cycle

THE domino effect of children in today’s run-down schools having to face similar problems in college, makes for a dreary picture of Irish education.

Having squandered the wealth of the Celtic Tiger era, when millions were doled out by the Coalition in a reckless vote-buying spree, the Government is now savaging the very education system that fuelled the economic boom.

Significantly, a timely call for a dramatic increase of investment at third level has come, not as one might expect from the Opposition, but from a leading educationalist.

Just as the general public was forced to don the hair-shirt, the country’s vital technology institutes are also suffering after the Government slashed building and capital budgets by one-third.

It would be folly to ignore the grim warning of an impending crisis, as a result of swingeing cutbacks, issued by Dr Mary Meaney, head of the Council of Directors of Institutes of Technology.

Shamefully, the children of today, who are already educationally and socially victimised in ill-equipped, rat-infested and leaking schools, will be deprived long into the future at the dilapidated colleges of tomorrow.