Parents who take children out of school for foreign holidays face legal action, the new school attendance body has warned.
Criticising what he termed a "culture of casual non-attendance", Eddie Ward, chief executive of the National Education Welfare Board, said the agency was determined to confront the problem. The board must be informed by schools if a pupil is absent for 20 days or more.
Mr Ward said all absences from school would be noted "including those days that parents sometimes think don't count - the mid-season holidays, the days taken for Christmas shopping or looking for the Confirmation clothes, the days off after the baby's Christening, for example."
The board has already begun legal moves which could, for the first time, see parents fined or even jailed for serious breaches of the school attendance laws.
School attendance notices - the first step towards court action - have been issued to more than 20 parents in recent months.
The parents face a €600 fine and/or up to three months imprisonment, unless they take action to improve their children's attendance. The legal proceedings also involve cases where a child has been absent from school for several months without any explanation.
Yesterday, Mr Ward pointed out that a "day missed is a day that has to be made up by a child at some stage. For some children this might pose no problem. For some, however, it can put undue pressure on them to catch up. It is better that children miss days only if they are sick or if there is a serious family issue," he said.
He was speaking at the launch of the board's first strategic plan for the period to 2007. The board has taken on the role once performed by school attendance officers and the Garda.
In its first year of service last year, the board's welfare officers opened more than 17,000 cases and answered more than 7,000 calls on its helpline. The development of the board, however, has been inhibited by a lack of funding. Several counties have no education welfare officers because of a lack of resources.
Research compiled by the board underlines the seriousness of the truancy problem. It shows that more than 80,000 children missed 20-plus days of school last year.
A report published earlier this year indicated that over a quarter of secondary students from poorer areas missed school for at least one month in every academic year.
