Alan Farrell (Dublin Fingal, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy and the Minister. I am next on the list of speakers and I have some questions on the same subject matter. I want to bring this to the attention of the Minister because I have spoken to more than a dozen principals of secondary schools and nine principals of primary schools in the past week. They have reported a delay in the notification of close contacts. They are getting the notification from the school through parents, the children themselves or hearsay but the notification of an actual close contact is taking another day. I fully appreciate that is the duty of the Department of Health and the public health officials to do this. It was, of course, in the second week back in school and, therefore, many children were circulating at primary and secondary level. I want to report this to the Minister because it was a point made to me by a number of principals. They believed it was important to mention.

On foot of the conversations I had in recent weeks, I want to report some positive things that came to my attention. These were unprompted remarks from principals at both levels. They were pleased with the supports they were given for school cleaning. Particularly last year, they felt very informed in terms of making decisions on the provision of additional supports, whether administrative, teaching or otherwise. This was at both levels. A number of principals, unprompted, suggested this to me. It is worth mentioning because, as is often the case at these committees as the Minister will understand, we focus on the problems. I wanted to focus on the positives.

I will now pivot to make some remarks. I thank the Chair for raising the hot school meals programme. It is a very worthy endeavour by the Department of Social Protection. I know it is not in the remit of the Minister's Department. It is important and I would like to see an initiative, particularly when it comes to the infrastructure in certain schools that cannot cater for these measures. I would be interested to know whether it would be the job of the Department of Education to provide certain schools that may not have them with the funding to build the necessary facilities to provide hot meals. Would it be supported in some manner through the Department of Social Protection? This is a really brief question and I would like a really brief answer if the Minister would not mind.