Fiona O'Loughlin (Kildare South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

No, I am not going to allow any more questions now. I am glad the Minister has clarified that he will seek accountability and find the individuals who are culpable. What we have become aware of in recent weeks has been very upsetting. It has also been devastating for 42 school communities. The Department has handled the issue well in terms of communications. It also put together teams to carry out checks and rechecks. It deployed a group of 250 workers to check all of the schools. I commend it on doing so.

The Minister must deal with a legacy issue. I wonder how the various issues were allowed to build up. This matter has caused great concern among members and among people in the school communities. Some 42 schools are involved, four of which are located in my constituency. I was contacted by representatives of another school that was not built by Western Building Systems. The people told me that they had a lot of issues with their school and found the Department sadly lacking in terms of following up in respect of them. The people took the initiative to engage an independent engineer to examine the issues. He was shocked by what he discovered and found the Department unhelpful. The people managed to get the builders back on site and the school is now 100%.

It is good that we are going to have the clerk of works back before the committee. I am not sure when the cut-off point was but we did not have the clerk of works in on this issue. It would make sense that the clerk of works would be an engineer and that he or she would be a resident engineer as opposed to a clerk of works, particularly in the context of checking all of the issues that impact on the safety of children and staff.

I want to ask a few specific questions. The Minister referred to the lessons learned and the need for more oversight, with which we all agree. I remain unclear as to who was responsible for signing off the work and whether departmental officials were involved and if they were suitably qualified. It is key that we be given such information.

I was surprised to hear that there is no estimated cost for the remedial works at this point. I accept that checking, rechecking and remediation work had to be prioritised. It would be useful if the Minister supplied us with an estimated cost and, subsequently, the supplementary costs for which I have no doubt he will be supported. Will attempts be made to recover the costs through insurance claims, from Western Building Systems, or from engineers who signed off on these projects? Even though engineers had signed off on a project in Millfield, Newbridge, County Kildare, which is in my constituency, there was no culpability afterwards. People should be held accountable. Thankfully, the project at Ardgillan was an outlier in terms of defects. The defects at Millfield were not as bad as anything discovered at Ardgillan.

Western Building Systems should be precluded from future tenders as a result of what we have learned. Representatives of the company have stated that they were not given enough time on site to carry out structural evaluations. We must discover why they were not afforded enough time. I have more questions but they have already been answered.

I ask the Minister and Mr. Loftus to answer the questions posed and to respond to the issues raised by myself and Deputy Boyd Barrett.