Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

My colleague, the Minister for Arts, Sports and Tourism, Deputy O'Donoghue is very supportive of the provision of sports facilities for communities. Obviously, where that may be done in conjunction with education, it is the way forward. The difficulty is that the Department of Education and Science does not own most of the schools throughout the country. In general a board of management is in place and the schools are owned by a community or an order, so the Department is not in a position to stipulate that the space should be made available. That said, where PE halls are located in community and VEC colleges, in general they are made available to the wider community. However, the Department has no control over situations where it does not own the schools. We have been reviewing planning norms in respect of areas where primary and second-level developments are taking place to see whether it might be possible to build education campuses. This could perhaps accommodate primary and secondary school levels along with the sharing of facilities. We are examining that in our negotiations over particular sites, to see how space may be optimised. That is the way forward. The ideal, of course, would be to have a greenfield site everywhere when wonderful things could be done.

I am conscious of the needs of inner cities and heavily urbanised areas. Given that so much money is going into small and rural schemes, I am anxious that greater attention should be paid to people with particular needs in large urban areas. It is not always possible to meet those needs, however, because of space constraints.

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