Green party leader Eamon Ryan has rejected a Labour Party call for teachers and special needs assistants to be prioritised for a coronavirus booster injection because of exposure to unvaccinated children.
Mr Ryan said that putting one profession ahead of another could affect public support for the vaccination programme.
“I don’t believe it would be appropriate to start diverting from the strategy that our vaccination programme has followed,” he said.
The Minister for Environment was responding to Labour education spokesman Aodhán Ó Riordáin who told him teachers “are saying daily that the system is at the brink of collapse”.
Mr Ó Riordáin said there was “a huge amount of confusion and lack of leadership” on the issue and school principals are contacting every TD in the House on the issue. But Mr Ryan insisted that the existing arrangement based on age cohorts had been “hugely successful”, enjoying public support.
“I think we might risk losing some of that if we started to divide between professionals as to who would get boosters next. I don’t think that makes sense.”
Mr Ó Riordáin said the Government should stop coming out with this mantra that schools are safe. Schools are “no safer than any other work environment, but it’s really important for us to keep them open”, he said.
He added that the Government “one-liner” that schools are safe is not in touch with the day-to-day experience of schools communities.
Air purifiers
He said the Minister for Education on Wednesday was on the radio “telling the country antigen tests will be rolled out in schools by the end of this week”. But The Irish Times reported on Thursday that it would not happened until the week after next, which is December.
In April a group chaired by Prof Mark Ferguson told the Government that antigen testing should be rolled out in primary and post-primary schools, added Mr Ó Riordáin.
He said that UCD associate Prof Orla Hegarty had said it would cost €12 million to have air purifiers installed in every classroom in the State and these were practical suggestions.
Mr Ó Riordáin warned that if the system collapses and schools have to close it would be profoundly damaging for children and young people, but “society will not be able to function”.
Mr Ryan said that as difficult as the situation is at the moment “we are in a very different place now” compared to earlier in the year, because of the vaccination programme.
The Minister acknowledged that schools were under pressure and under real stress over availability of staff.
He said the Department of Education had increased the substitute panel to 500 places. It had written to 111,000 teachers to see if there are any including retired teachers who might be willing to return to work.
It has also written to the higher-level education colleges to see if trainee primary school teachers “could help close the gap”.
But the booster programme “will give us real ability to avoid the sort of lockdown measures that were required at the early stages in this Covid pandemic”.
