John O'Donoghue (Kerry South, Fianna Fail)

It should be pointed out that since 1998, under the sports capital programme, 4,923 grants have been awarded to various sporting organisations. This has occurred in every city, town, village and parish. The value of the grants in total is €395 million. Children would have access to these facilities. We have covered considerable ground in providing sporting facilities for the nation.

As the Deputy is aware, the funding of schools' sports halls is the responsibility of my colleague, the Minister, Deputy Hanafin. As I outlined in my reply, the assessment criteria for applications under the sports capital programme include the extent to which integrated facilities are available to a school and its wider community.

Additionally, my Department has commenced work on the development of a sports facility strategy that will advocate a planned approach to the provision of sports facilities at local and national level. An inter-agency steering group has been established to oversee this work. It includes representations from the Department of Education and Science. One of the key areas being examined as part of this strategy is community access to school facilities. This relates to both optimising use by local communities of existing school facilities outside school hours and how the Department might provide funding to plan sport halls in schools to enhance the facilities, where necessary, to facilitate a wide range of sports.

However, there are genuine concerns within schools relating to issues such as security, insurance and running costs which can be barriers to facilitating community access which need to be addressed. Where schools benefit from funding to enhance their facilities on the basis of the wider benefit to the local community, there needs to be a mechanism to ensure that this access is provided and maintained into the future. It is expected that work on this strategy will be completed later this year.

Last year we received 30 school applications. A total of €634,000 was allocated to seven primary and post-primary school projects which met the criteria I outlined. I accept the need to improve physical education facilities in schools. We will look carefully at any applications received this year from schools which have the support of the local community.

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