Mr. Hubert Loftus:

I will take the lead on some of the questions and Mr. Power will talk about the GIS, as well as Ashbourne and south Kildare. A variety of questions were asked. If it is acceptable, I will pick up on some of the common themes that emerged in the discussion and address any remaining questions afterwards.

On the issue of funding and concerns about projects on this building list, one of my priorities since coming into the job as head of the planning and building division has been dealing with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform in respect of funding and the national development plan, NDP. I have been in this job six months, having previously worked in the unit more than ten years ago. I have endeavoured to position the Department so that it can address the twin priorities of dealing with demographics and focusing on refurbishment.

We have a budget of €8.4 billion for the schools sector under the NDP. That compares to the previous ten-year period, for which we had a budget of €4.9 billion. This is a massive increase in funding which positions us to focus on demographics and increase our focus on refurbishment. That translates into very immediate current funding of €540 million in 2018. In 2019, our budget will be in excess of €620 million. That gives us the financial capacity to move things forward.

For decades, there has been underinvestment in public infrastructure in Ireland, not just in schools but across entire areas. There is an element of catching up in spite of a legacy of historic underinvestment. However, much good work is happening and a lot of investment is going in now. The discussion today is about schools but, separate to that, huge investment is going into the higher education sector under the NDP. That sector will receive €2.2 billion in capital investment over the next ten years, compared with €800 million in the previous ten-year period.

To get a sense of the scale of what is happening, members should consider that between €440 million and €450 million worth of large-scale and other projects were under construction at the beginning of this year. That can be compared with previous years. In 2010, the equivalent figure was €130 million. That gives a sense of the funding and investment going into school buildings. However, as I mentioned already, there is an element of catch-up involved.

In regard to transparency, information, communication and related issues, one of the things I was anxious to do was streamline the information on our website. There were multiple lists on our website and they were not being updated. I wanted to simplify that and give everyone, including schools and public representatives, a very clear picture in the form of a county-by-county list setting out the current status of all projects being delivered as part of the schools building programme.

That list was updated on our website last week and we will be updating that list of large-scale projects at the end of every month. That gives a clear picture to schools of the current status of their projects.

In terms of giving timelines to tender and construction generally, the learning experience of the Department - hearing from the schools today, there will be various learning experiences - is that the best period to give certainty to schools of their timeline to tender and construction is when the site issues have been resolved when a project has progressed through planning permission. If one thinks of it, the two key issues that affect projects are having the site and having planning permission. Those issues would have impacted on some of the schools that the committee had before it today.

In recent weeks, we would have issued individual letters to more than 50 schools that had their detailed design done - a bit like Whitecross and St. Paul's - giving them clarity and setting out the action plan or pathway for each of those projects progressing through prequalification of contractors and tender through to the construction. Those letters would have set out a timeline which invariably involves going to construction either over the course of 2018 or into 2019. That gives the clarity to those individual schools.

I accept we do not do everything perfectly in the Department. We have a centralised unit in Tullamore and there are 4,000 schools feeding into us. It is not feasible for us to have the perfect individualised service to each and every school but there is some learning experience that we can take away from today to see how we can improve that and have centralised points of contact for schools as they work their way through.

In terms of the way we are organised in the planning and building division, we have our forward planning which looks ahead to the democratic needs and the enrolment trends and where our new school requirements are. We have site acquisitions that follow through on those announcements. We have our architectural planning areas that work through projects going into architectural planning and our rapid team is part of that as well, and ultimately, into construction as well. We can look at that and see if there is a learning experience for us.

The announcement of the 42 schools triggered quite a lot of public comment, comment from Members - I am sure the committee has heard it as well - and concerns from other schools as to how that might impact on them. We see this as part of normal business. These 42 schools will be part of the pipeline of projects to be delivered as part of the school building programme along with the projects that we have listed on our website. That sets out the current status of those.

A new element which has been learned from other schools is that we want to set out a four-year horizon of our new school requirements. In our previous announcement of new schools when we were announcing the school building programme in 2015, we announced the new schools that would be needed in 2017 and 2018 as well. That was giving a two-year lead-in period for the delivery of those projects. What we have done in the most recent announcement is set out the list of school requirements over a four-year horizon. That gives us better capacity to put in place the solutions, both accommodation and site, to deliver the accommodation for those schools when it is needed and avoid as much as possible the need for prefab solutions. That gives us a better lead-in period.

While the Gaelscoil in Knocklyon has a long history regarding prefabs, keeping it at a higher level regarding prefabs generally, it has to be recognised that the Department has put 5,000 extra teachers into the school system over the past two years and that has triggered accommodation requirements. In some cases that can be dealt with within the individual accommodation of the school, but in other cases it triggers an accommodation need. In those cases where those schools do their enrolment, and many schools do their enrolment in the February-March period of each year and new teachers start in September, even with the best will in the world that needs an interim accommodation solution while permanent accommodation is being put in place.

We have put a huge concentrated effort into dealing with the prefab issue. To a large extent, it is also a legacy of the past when there would have been historic underinvestment. We deal with that in a number of ways. In 2008, for example, we had approximately 2,000 classrooms in rented prefab accommodation. At the end of 2017, we had approximately 1,300. We are at a much lower level. Our spend on rented prefab accommodation was €14.5 million in 2017. It would have been a multiple of that figure in 2008.

As for what we have done, we have put in place the additional accommodation scheme which is a devolved scheme. Deputy Jan O'Sullivan mentioned devolved projects. It is a hugely successful scheme in delivering permanent solutions to schools for additional classroom accommodation, and that has helped to reduce the need for prefab requirements. Since 2010, more than 1,900 projects have been delivered under that scheme catering for, as I stated in my submission, 60,000 school places. That has been hugely successful and has helped reduce our reliance on prefabs. As part of further reducing our reliance on them, when we have new applications under that scheme, we look to see how we can replace prefabs as well as part of those applications. It is making further inroads into the prefab replacement, which is something to which we are committed. That gives a broad sense of where we are in terms of funding and in terms of approach to projects.

In terms of delivery mechanisms, a valid point was raised about the capacity of, say, school principals to manage the delivery of projects and how that is managed. Part of the learning experience for us is to see how best that can be achieved because we have various delivery mechanisms. One of those delivery mechanisms is the rapid build programme. This involves the design and building of schools with active project management, and it delivers ten new schools every year. I provided the committee, as part of the written submission, with a list of the 218 new schools that were built over the past eight years which shows the real active delivery of projects. In terms of the delivery mechanisms that were used in those 218 projects, 97 of them would have been the traditional approach of schools and a design team, 75 of them of them would have been built under the rapid build programme, 22 of them would have been completed under the public private partnership programme, and 24 of them would have been done on a devolved based, either via the education and training board, the Office of Public Works, the National Development Finance Agency, NDFA, or the local authority. We have a wide variety of delivery mechanisms in place to ensure delivery.

Part of the learning experience for us is that the likes of the rapid build programme is particularly suitable for new school projects on greenfield sites. That will be our main method for getting new schools delivered, whether ones already on the existing programme or schools such as Ballinteer, as we have said to Ballinteer recently. No doubt it will probably be the method used in the Gaelscoil in Knocklyon as well because it provides a mechanism for getting a project delivered.

Ms O'Neill can speak about the timeline and what is involved in the rapid build programme, assuming a site is there and planning permission has a particularly smooth run. Our written submission tried to give the committee an idea that there is a lot happening. We would love for the committee to come down to Tullamore to get a sense of what we are doing. Much work has been done on planning and delivery - many projects are being delivered - and we want to reassure the committee that the projects on the school building programme are being delivered, will be delivered and are capable of being delivered as part of the national development plan. Our focus on the 42 new schools relates to our being given a better lead-in period to enable the accommodation solutions in a more structured manner.

I will ask Ms O'Neill to discuss the rapid build programme and Mr. Power about the geographic information system, GIS, and then I can come back on specific questions, including the three schools.