Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald described it as another example of the “squandering of taxpayers’ money”. The party leader also wrote to the Taoiseach to call on him to withdraw the measure.
While Social Democrats TD Gary Gannon said it was the “Minister for Education’s pet project taking precedence over more pressing matters” and described it as a scandalous waste of money.
The education minister said the measure was to support positive wellbeing among students and that she hoped it would be rolled out during the current academic year.
Despite the backlash to the proposal, one backbencher described the reaction by opposition as “contrived”.
“If this is one of 10 or 15 different things that schools are doing, that school management is doing without a cent, they did this themselves a lot of schools, and the educational professionals are saying it’s a good thing, you know damn well that it’s a contrived piece of political theatre,” the TD said.
The TD said they had been contacted by one school in their constituency who had introduced the pouches and said they saw an increase in attention span of students as well as a reduction in bullying.
“In politics, these things happen but in saying that, it’s awful nonsense,” they added.
Another TD said there was a “reasonable argument” for the funding, if a ban on mobile phones is to be implemented in schools. They also said the measure was “easy to ridicule”.
“You can’t have an omelette without cracking eggs,” they said. “It doesn’t seem to me an unreasonable thing for the minister to be providing some form of a solution,” they added.
They added that schools in their area had already purchased the phone pouches long before the budget announcement and that it had cost them a significant amount of money.
“But they found it well worth while doing it. They wanted to do it and wanted to know from me where they were supposed to get the money because they had other obligations,” they said.
“If the minister is seeking a uniform adoption of a strategy that she believes and I think has good grounds for believing it will be of advantage to the children, it’s not unreasonable that schools get some compensation for implementing it,” they added.
However, one TD did question the logistics of the strategy, though they were broadly supportive of the funding allocation.
“If a principal in a school decides, right, I’m going to ask everyone to hand these up, where does he or she put them?” they said.
“How does he or she segregate them, given the fact they are expensive and given the fact there is a lot of work.
“If you have a school of a thousand teenagers and you are taking a thousand phones off kids, its a lot of money and its a lot of management,” they added.
