Ms Lisa Ryan:

I will respond to Senator Ruane's question on the impact of green space. There are a few issues here. Obviously, health and well-being are associated with exercise. However, one can see what happens in a national school such as ours where there is a mixed socio-economic group. It is the poor children who suffer because sports facilities are not being offered on site in the school, whereas the middle-class children are being driven to clubs or other places. The further impact is that clubs are also being affected. I am involved in Kilmacud Crokes, for example, and there are not enough pitches for a club of that size, so it is very dependent on the schools having pitches that it can use. One can pass the buck and say the schools can use the facilities in the area, but the clubs need the schools' pitches to play. There has to be some type of joined-up thinking about how many pitches there are in a certain area. Perhaps it is more efficient to try to economise and have some sharing but currently there are just not enough pitches.

The other problem in our school is that there is a health and safety issue with a building going up on the site. A five storey apartment building is going up at present and the main access road to the site is the entrance to the school. A digger fell over this year and the fence was knocked down. That is a health and safety issue. Approximately 120 houses will be built on the 5.5 acres that have just been sold. That is at the back of the site and, again, the access road will be the main entrance to the grounds. That is another health and safety issue.

I am not a planner. I accept that I am here as a parent but I wish to comment on the issue of ownership by the Department of Education and Skills and the local authority and planning. As I mentioned in my submission, we have talked to both. It appears that it is being passed around. The issue is that the land is privately held, as Mr. Loftus said, in the vast majority of national schools. One can talk about who will maintain that land but it does not have to be maintained if it is going to be sold and developed. There will be no land. It is basically a ticking time bomb. Some €13 million was paid for the land at the back of our school and, while I understand that the Department cannot afford to buy every piece of land, we have a lovely primary school and it was built and paid for by the Department. Surely some negotiation could have happened at that time in 2008 so there is some type of quid pro quowhereby a school is built and one field is retained.

As Deputy Thomas Byrne said, when the orders built those schools in the 1950s and 1960s, they thought the land and playing pitches were needed. Somehow, when the orders are no longer running the schools, the playing pitches appear to be no longer necessary or important for the schools. They are necessary. There has to be some type of system if a school is being built and there is land on the site. I understand that it might be an impossibility if a new school is being built in an urban area and there is not enough land, but if land is there and before we sell it, can we not work out some way for the Department to ask the local authority to designate the land for educational purposes so it is not zoned? Once it is zoned as residential, it is difficult to go back. There is a great deal of money involved, landowners can sue and so forth. Perhaps the Department of Education and Skills needs to step in at the beginning of the process and ask the local authority not to designate the land residential because after that there is too much money in the game.