Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail)
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I will pick up where the Minister left off on school transport. I realise the result of the review is imminent. On flexibility, as raised by Deputy Conway-Walsh, the Minister will be aware of the specific circumstances of Watergrasshill, a village in the hinterland of the town of Fermoy. The Minister's head is probably wrecked by my flagging these peculiar circumstances. Historically and traditionally, students from Watergrasshill went to Fermoy. Schools were subsequently built in Carrignavar and Glanmire, making the school in Fermoy the third nearest, but the vast majority of students still travel to Fermoy. These students find themselves outside the remit of the scheme. Regardless of whether the full review is carried out on time in respect of these circumstances, I believe a case can be made for the 50 students who do not qualify. I hope there will be flexibility or a proviso in the upcoming review to cover circumstances where there is a demonstrable requirement for a bus.

The second issue, which I mentioned last week when the buildings forward planning unit was before the committee, is oversight of projects that are already sanctioned. Autism spectrum disorder, ASD, classes and extensions of various kinds might be sanctioned and taking a number of years to work their way through planning, tendering and so on, but a few of them just sit there, as it were. I have a question about the oversight of those projects. Are they being constantly kept under review to ensure we are churning them out? To be fair, the Minister has announced one of the largest infrastructure programmes I can recall. I, like the Minister, taught in a school for long enough. The number of buildings and extensions going on is phenomenal. It is just a question of who is continuing to keep those under review.

The third issue is the special school site in Glanmire. I raised it with the building unit representatives last week. Their answer was that the issue was still with the legals, so to speak. Cork City Council is telling me it is finished with the issue and it has been disposed of. I wish to keep it on the agenda. I have talked to many stakeholders, as has the Minister, in Cork and the wider area, and many of them have concerns we will face the same situation we did almost two years ago with the refurbishment of the new school in Carrigaline. None of us wish to go back to the kind of situation where we have a large number of children who may have nowhere to go. I wish to see the site in Glanmire progress as quickly as possible.

The last issue I wish to flag is a fairly contentious issue that arose in my constituency a number of months ago with regard to school amalgamation. I tried to do a fair bit of research into it at the time. It seemed that many of the guidelines around the amalgamation process of schools was outdated. I was reading documents going back to 2006. I may be wrong and I may have missed some very obvious documentation that is much more current. The Minister might let me know. We need to keep the issue under review given the number of amalgamations that are likely to happen going forward. I thank the Minister for her time.