‘AS SOON AS ONE YEAR ENDS, YOU HAVE TO START PLANNING FOR NEXT TERM’

DUBLIN mother AnneMarie Murtagh is living proof of the high true cost of supposedly free education.

She told us how she will have to fork out around €5,000 just to send three children off to school this year.

‘It’s a constant battle. As soon as one year finishes you have to start planning for the next,’ she says. ‘We’re constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul. To raise money for this year, we had to take in foreign students. In previous years, we went to the credit union.

‘And we’re lucky enough not to have a crippling mortgage.

‘A lot of people my age do have a crippling mortgage and I wonder how they cope.’

And her estimate covers just those expenses such as travel, uniforms and schoolbooks plus the school registration fees and ‘voluntary’ contributions that parents are under pressure to pay.

Her figure doesn’t include lunches, school trips and other expenses such as gym gear that can increase the cost of schooling even more. One of her biggest outlays is technology. As her school has an ebooks policy, she has to buy three Apple iPads, preloaded with books, at €800 apiece.

And it costs another €360 a year to insure them. She’s also annoyed that ebooks can’t be passed down from child to child, or sold at the end of the school cycle to help fund new books.