Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I beg the Deputy's pardon. That is something we all share. The city manager or county manager will tell the equivalent administrative person that the council will facilitate the project and that message goes down the line until it reaches the planning officer, who says there is a local area plan in the draft plan - this was driven by the Celtic tiger - such that in an area to be developed for private sector housing, proper planning suggested that the local neighbourhood centre should be in the middle of that development. However, since the Celtic tiger collapsed the site has remained a brown field and the school is located out in the middle of that area. There is no indication of when the rest of the development will be built, but because the school is to be the first physical item of development on that site, the Department of Education and Skills and the building unit are required to pay for much of the preliminary work, such as the road into the middle of the site and related engineering costs. In one case I saw when I visited Tullamore in the past six weeks, the fire officer effectively wanted a swimming pool built under the school so that it would have a water reserve in the event of fires breaking out in buildings that were yet to be built. They saw us coming with the chequebook of taxpayers' money, one public authority to another, and felt that we were fair game. The alternative is to change the location of the school and put it to the edge of the site where it would abut the existing road infrastructure.