An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-29
============================================================

Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

We are probably less brilliant than we were, as opposed to dumber and dumber. We are very high-up there. One wonders is that related to the advent of social media in terms of reading, literacy skills and numeracy. It is extremely important that AI and all of that, while very important, does not take away the capacity to reason, be creative and be original in one's thinking and analysing of the world and of issues and so on like that. There will be continued investment in education. The primacy of maths, English and so on is still very important at primary level in the overall curriculum. Class sizes have come way down but are variable, depending on location or on how the school allocates numbers and teachers.
I will not go into the age-old argument of whether the pupil-teacher ratio influences outcomes. A whole lot of other factors influence outcomes as well. The demographics are going down. The big issue we will have in the next decade is redeployment of existing resources to maximise outcomes of the kind the Deputy has identified.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:00:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-29