Mr. Hubert Loftus:

The Chair intervened before I covered all of the questions. Regarding the meeting about Our Lady's Grove, I was not a part of the building unit then and the national demographic analysis was not completed. The demographic analysis was only completed in 2018. It was only at that point that the need for two new schools in the Goatstown-Stillorgan school planning area was identified. That is a significant area. The Department is looking at site options for those schools and it has a number of site options in mind.

In terms of the inventory generally, there was a pilot inventory done previously in the school buildings area covering County Kildare. That covered two elements: the geographical information system, GIS, element and a detailed analysis of the accommodation and condition reports regarding school buildings. The GIS element is the one that the Department scaled up to national level and that is used particularly in the Department's forward planning work. The Department's experience with the accommodation and condition reports was they were detailed and cumbersome and quickly became out of date as things evolved in terms of the buildings and as work was done to the buildings.

In more recent years, schools were invited to provide information about their buildings and many schools did that.

Much work is also being done with the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland as part of the national development plan refurbishment, which involves a deep energy retrofit of school buildings.

That energy monitoring can provide a type of audit in a different way by identifying those schools with very significant energy usage which can be a proxy for dealing with some of the condition issues in certain schools. We are doing considerable piloting and testing of that at the moment.