Ms Anne McDonagh:

The meetings were held. Fr. Michael O'Kelly was the parish priest at the time. He employed the facilitator and that was the first I knew about the matter. He invited me to a meeting one night at 7.30 p.m., in the dark, and I got lost on my way out to the schools. That was my first visit there and it was in 2008. One of the chairpersons of the schools told me that they were talking about this since the late 1990s, which was said at one of the meetings lately. The meetings I know about started in 2008. That is where the talks started - at local level.

Generally, when I have spoken about any of the successful amalgamations in the past few years I have outlined the steps involved. Parents are called in. All of the rationale behind the thinking that is going on is explained to the parents. Before that happened in Ballyfermot somebody released information at an inappropriate time and, as a result, parents telephoned me and were very upset. I am a parent of children and I would not be happy if information came home from my school in the way it happened in Ballyfermot. It is no wonder the parents were upset. They did not know what was going on or the rationale behind it.

Deputy Conaghan mentioned the campus in De La Salle. He is correct that it is an outstanding campus. I do not know whether everyone has seen it but it is beautiful. It has a fabulous building and terrific grounds. The Deputy wondered why one school was chosen rather than the other. The archdiocese of Dublin does not own the De La Salle campus. It owns the Dominican campus because the Dominican congregation handed its schools over to the archdiocese, as have a number of congregations. Over the years a number of congregations have come to us and said that because they are getting older and there are fewer of them they cannot manage and they have handed over to the archdiocese. The Dominican Order did that a number of years ago. Therefore, the Ballyfermot parish owns the Dominican site and the De La Salle Brothers own the other site.

Let us look at the rationale. I have figures for repair bills. Three years ago the repair bill for the De La Salle building was €70,000, the repair bill two years ago was €63,000 and the repair bill in the year 2012-13 was €70,000. That is a total spend of €203,000 in three years which is unrecoverable and there is no grant available from the Department of Education and Skills. The building has a copper roof and €30,000 of the expenditure was to do with the roof. Earlier, I gave heating and lighting costs for the school as an example. The size of the building means it is unsustainable. In an ideal world a philanthropist would pay for all that work but the State will not do so. Those are the facts of the matter.

The number of children at the moment means the grants will not pay for two campuses. We got the Department to appoint an architect - a departmental architect - and look at the site on the former Dominican campus to assess whether it would fit all of the children. We have got word back from the Department that it will.