This article is from page 4 of the 2011-10-11 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 4 JPG
CLARE has emerged as the county to lose out in a government costcutting plan that has seen Minister for Education Ruáiri Quinn implement a radical restructuring of the Vocational Education Committees around the country.
On Tuesday, Minister Quinn announced that the county’s VEC headquarters at Station Road in Ennis is to close as part of merger of VECs in Clare, Limerick City and County.
As part of this new blueprint for the administration of vocational education around the country, which was first mooted by the Fianna Fáil/ Greens coalition, Limerick City has been chosen as the new headquarters for the mid-west.
The slashing cuts across the sector are being achieved through the amalgamation of existing VECs bringing the total number from 33 to 16.
Hopes were high a sub-office of the VEC would be maintained in the county capital, but Minister Quinn has confirmed that this would not be the case.
This decision has been made, despite local Fine Gael TD Pat Breen claiming that “the retention of a sub-office in Ennis would be costneutral because the Department of Education owns the building in Ennis”.
Concluding he said that “County Clare always seems to be the poor relation when decisions on regional services are being made. We have already lost our accident and emergency service and our Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food office to Limerick and now we are about to lose our VEC office.”
Minister of State Ciaran Cannon, said that “the main purpose of the VEC rationalisation is to bring about greater efficiencies” and in that regard he said that “the optimum headquarters location for the new merged VEC is within the greater city of Limerick area”.
However, Minister Cannon agreed that in the short-term a sub-office in Ennis will be maintained in order to facilitate an “orderly merger”.