Kathleen Funchion (Carlow-Kilkenny, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate that the Minister was not long in the job when this issue came to light so I have some sympathy for him. No school in my constituency in either county has been affected so I have not had the same contact with parents as other members of the committee and Deputies here. Not so long ago, there was an issue with tools being downed in the case of schools built through public private partnerships. As we now face issues relating to contractors, it shines a light on what happens when we start privatising stuff. The State needs to play a much larger role in building schools, which are so important because young children attend them on a daily basis.

My main focus, on which Senator Ruane also touched, is how we make sure this does not happen again. I think the State needs to play a much larger role. In respect of the clerk of works not having the authority to certify, the buck should stop with somebody from the Department. While the Department can go after the contractors all it likes, these contractors can close down and operate under a new business name two or three weeks later. As they do it to their workers all the time, there is no reason why they would not do it to the State. The Department could be tied into a legal battle for a very long time only to get nothing out of it. Consequently, the most significant lesson we need to learn is how we prevent this from happening again. There are many schools that are either in the middle of a new school build or have been given the go-ahead and tendering is happening. These are not buildings that were there for 80 or 90 years with no work done on them. Many of them are very new so if this work was done properly, problems should not occur.

Who is liaising with the parents? Some people may be in a really difficult situation if the school is closed because there is nowhere for their children to go. Many people cannot take time off work. It may cost them their jobs. In particular, there is a lot of pressure on someone parenting alone. Is there a contact person in the Department who can give parents information? While I am not dealing directly with parents in this regard, what usually happens in such situations is people say they cannot get any information. Hopefully, that is not the case here but I wonder about that.

My last point concerns schools in general and cases in which they sometimes apply for the summer works or minor works funding. Schools can often apply year after year and may not qualify. The Department needs to be a little more proactive in looking at schools that might not fail a health and safety check and which might be safe for kids to attend but which are in a very bad state of repair. We all know schools in our areas that are in such a position. Rather than seeing them develop safety concerns, we need to look at some of these grants. I refer, for example, to people looking for extensions, applying every year for funding and for some reason being told either they have it but there is a delay or they will not get it for the year in question. While there technically might not be safety issues at such schools, there may be issues of too many kids in the school, an over-reliance on prefabs, very bad facilities and so on. This shines a light on the more general issue of the conditions of our schools and that we need to try to keep them up to a certain standard. It comes back to resources but if we want a good education system with quality education and so on, kids must be taught in appropriate buildings.