Aisling Dolan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the departmental officials and I thank them for their statements.. They are going through the performance report and they have highlighted quite a lot of different areas. I wish to go through a few issues with them.

The Department is looking at school buildings and school places according to the national development plan. I have heard some of our representatives here talk about the development, the new buildings and so on. I am based in Ballinasloe and I represent Roscommon-Galway, and there is a real challenge there regarding new school builds. My question is related to that. Potentially, it is for Ms Kirwan from the school planning and building section. I ask about a particular school planning area, namely, primary schools. What is the average number of schools within a school planning area? For example, in Ballinasloe it has been indicated there are 17. I have made a number of requests, not to the Department directly but just in general to the Oireachtas liaison, to find out which schools are in that school planning area but I still have not received a response. How is this identified? The geographical information service is being used and data from census 2022 is probably feeding into the GIS as well. There are primary school capacity issues for Ballinasloe townland area. I have only recently invited the Minister and I would love to invite the witnesses to Ballinasloe as well. There are a number of excellent things happening but there are real challenges in that area in that space. The school planning report is great because it indicates the amount of work that is done. In 2022 there were 108 builds, which is wonderful. I am curious about that figure. What are new builds and what is additional accommodation? The Department has been excellent in providing additional accommodation classrooms. How does the Department connect between the school planning area for Ms Kirwan and who manages transport? I apologise as I do not know. Who manages the transport section? When Ms Kirwan says there is a capacity issue, there are no primary school places and there is no space for additional accommodation, which is the case for a number of schools, how do we then say that we need buses put in place? It has to be outside of the strict remit of school transport at the moment. We will put buses in place to ferry children from the town out to perhaps a 5 km or 10 km radius to make sure that capacity is there. How is that managed?

Regarding school transport, I believe the extra funds are at more than €90 million in the budget this year but I am open to correction. How will those funds be used to provide additional transport? What is the planning around that? How will Bus Éireann be supported and engaged with? What are the Department’s links with Bus Éireann on this? I deal particularly with the Bus Éireann transport section in Galway. It can be difficult because we have not had buses, we do not have infrastructure and there is a challenge around drivers. What is the Department’s plan to improve that? It is still a challenge. It is a challenge for many regional areas and I represent regional areas.

On the climate action fund, solar panels were mentioned. I spoke with the Minster, Deputy Eamon Ryan, who visited Roscommon County Council only last week. He indicated that this fund would open shortly. This fund was supposed to open last year. When is “shortly”? When will that happen? He indicated it would be through the Department of Education. Subsequent to that, what is the planning process? The Department is giving project managers to schools to have them manage projects. How will the Department help them manage applying for solar panels? Will there be a recommendation of X solar panels for an X-size roof? Will it be with the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI? Will the Department provide a project manager? Will there be a one-stop shop for each county area for them to apply or will it be up to a principal to do this work? Who will do the work of identifying how, getting it implemented and getting people in place and everything to do that? I am curious.

I will leave it at those three questions. If I have time to come back in, I would appreciate it. I thank the witnesses again for their attention to these matters.