Mr. Hubert Loftus:

I am happy to work through some of the individual issues the Deputies and Senators have raised. I will take them in the sequence in which they were raised. Senator Ruane mentioned instances where the Department says we have been in regular contact with schools yet this is not the experience of some of the individual schools. From the Department's perspective, we are a single, central unit dealing with 4,000 schools. There are some constraints on our capacity to respond to each and every query from every school. We were anxious to update our website and streamline the information on it as a means of giving a clearer and more transparent picture for schools in terms of the current status of all their projects. That is set out and listed now on our website in a single, clear list which will be updated at the end of every month.

The Senator also raised issues about how we can improve communication. That is one of the learning experiences we will take away from today to see, in addition to what we have done in terms of the website, if there is anything else we can do to help improve communications. That is something we will look at. She also raised issues about site acquisitions and compulsory purchase of sites. Compulsory purchase orders, CPOs, are done by local authorities. It has been done in a couple of cases in respect of schools and the local authorities have done it for us. It is not a simple or quick process. It takes time. Our experience is that it would be an option of last resort in terms of getting a site where there might be an unwilling vendor. Our experience is that if there is a willing vendor, we can work solutions around site issues in a speedier way rather than having to go down the CPO route.

Deputy Thomas Byrne raised various questions. Some of them were about individual schools in Meath. If the Deputy agrees, we might come back to him individually on those questions. I think there is in the order of 20 or 21 schools in Meath on the school building programme. We have set out on our website the current status of all those projects-----