Schools Administration
Seanad Éireann — 2026-10-01
============================================================

Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (FF), Labour Panel

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I thank the Cathaoirleach for choosing my Commencement matter this morning. The Minister of State is around the same go as myself, age wise, and I have no doubt he remembers that we used to return to school on 1 September every single year. When you got your summer holidays, you knew you were coming back on 1 September. That was the case up to fairly recently - maybe 12 or 13 years ago. I think it makes great sense that people know when they are getting their holidays that they will be returning on 1 September. I think it makes it easier for planning schedules, staff, special needs assistants, SNAs, etc.
There is a big thing affected by schools opening early. As for what I mean by "early", it started with schools being called back at the end of August but it is now very often the middle of August when they return. People just do not return on a whim; obviously, there is a lot of preparation and a lot of psyching up for students, etc. In essence, by it not being 1 September, August is, more or less, ruled out. This is having a detrimental effect, especially on tourism areas. I come from an area with a very high dependency on tourism, and speaking to people involved in the industry, they say that August is now a write-off. That is an awful pity. They are now very dependent on the month of July, which is obviously not enough for them to make a living.
I know it is up to each school and that every school has to clock in the same number of days but I would like the Department to look at this and bring it back in order that unless it is a Saturday or a Sunday, every school returns on 1 September. If it is a Saturday or Sunday, it should go to the Monday. This is just so the tourism industry can be looked after and schools can plan better.

---

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/seanad/2026-10-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:01:00+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-10-01