The Minister for Education, Mr Martin, has announced that he will introduce a new Education Bill before Christmas, scrapping the last government's proposed regional education boards.
Mr Martin said even had that legislation been passed, the cost of the education boards made it highly unlikely that they would ever have materialised.
He said the Department of Finance had produced "tentative estimates" of what the boards would cost in 1995, although the last minister, Ms Breathnach, had refused to reveal any costings in the face of Fianna Fail questioning.
The Department estimated that the boards would cost £20 million to set up, if the VECs were retained, and £35-40 million if the VECs were abolished and their costs transferred to the new boards.
"At the end of the day, the emphasis of the outgoing government was to get the legislation in place with the regional education boards," said Mr Martin. "The logistics of actually establishing the boards, both financial and organisational, suggest to me they would not have happened, certainly not in the next decade.
"How can we contemplate spending £20 million on regional education board structures if at the same time we're not in a position to give proper buildings to new schools or provide accommodation to existing schools?" The Minister said "a significant part" of the new legislation would involve the statutory recognition of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, which was left out of the original Bill.
There will also be legislative recognition of the "professional status of teachers", which the teachers unions complained was absent from last year's Bill.
Mr Martin said they were defining the role of the school principal. "We are anxious to give solid status to the principal as the instructional leader in the school and to his or her role on the board of management."
He would scrap the clause giving the Minister for Education powers "to compel schools to adopt a certain board of management structure" and to withdraw funding from a school if it failed to establish that structure.
"If we believe in partnership in education, there should be no room in legislation to compel the partners to do something," he said, expressing his confidence that 95-96 per cent of schools would set up boards of management.
In the Bill's general principles, there will be a recognition that education is not just schools-based but also involves "lifelong learning", he said. He would be consulting with the teachers, parents and management bodies to revise the appeals procedures in the original Bill.
While his proposed county education forums would be non-statutory, he might provide "an enabling mechanism" in the Bill to facilitate their establishment, he said.
He assured church bodies that the religious ethos of their schools would be guaranteed and conceded that the outgoing Government's proposals had become less contentious than when its Bill was first published in January.