Emmet Stagg (Kildare North, Labour)

I thank our spokesperson on education, Deputy O'Sullivan, and the Fine Gael spokesperson, Deputy Enright, for having tabled this motion. The right to a primary education is so basic and important that it is enshrined in Article 42 of the Constitution. Every parent in this rich country has a right to expect that that constitutional commitment will be honoured and that school places of a high standard will be provided for all children old enough to attend primary school. However, decent hard-working families who pay their taxes find that the constitutional commitment to which I referred is not being honoured by their own Government. They find that their children are taught in unsuitable and over-crowded prefabs or cannot find a school place for them regardless of what the Minister says about the matter.

The number of primary school places required in any community is entirely predictable. There is no rocket science involved. We have the census results, we know what land is zoned for development, and we can predict accurately the number of children and when they will need school places. It never ceases to amaze me that as a society we can build houses so rapidly that they seem to spring up of their own volition, like mushrooms. However, the provision of schools is hog-bound in bureaucratic procedures and red tape that takes years to produce a school.

Somebody should tell the educational planners the simple truth that when houses are built and young couples live together the natural outcome is that children are produced. From four and half years of age, children need school places. Somebody should also tell the educational planners about modern methods of producing buildings, especially buildings that are basically all the same. It is not necessary to go through a myriad of stages to get to a final decision. Perhaps the Minister might do these simple things to cut the red tape and actually produce classrooms. I assure parents and their children that when Deputy O'Sullivan is Minister for Education and Science in a year's time, she will do that. I also assure parents that Labour in Government will abolish the practice of providing prefab classrooms as a first resort. Such sub-standard accommodation will only be used in an emergency.

I will cite two case studies to demonstrate the points I am making. First, I will take the case of Kill national school, which was built in 1951. It now has nine prefabs in the school yard and another is being put in this summer. That will be the last prefab as no more will fit. Some 23 children have been refused places there in September because there is no room. The "oldest come first" rule has been applied, so some children will be six years old before they get places. Protestants have been told they are at the back of the queue. The school is now on a traffic island on the busiest motorway in the country and in the middle of one of the biggest engineering projects nationwide. The question must be asked again and again as to why this dire and acute situation has been allowed to develop to the crisis level that now exists in Kill, not just for the children who cannot get a school place for next year but also for the generation of children who have gone right through their primary education in sub-standard and overcrowded conditions.

The Department of Education and Science had access to the last and second last censuses for Kill. The Department and Minister were given a copy of the Kill development plan that accurately predicted the level of house building in the area. They could accurately calculate the number of children and the number of school places required in Kill.

What action has been taken to meet the entirely predictable demand for school places? In 1999, seven years ago, the OPW was instructed by one of the Minister's predecessors to find a suitable site in Kill for a new school. In 2002 a development plan was adopted for Kill village. The Fianna Fáil majority was generous to local landowners by zoning large tracts of land for housing but they zoned only one site for educational use, a site deemed to be archaeologically sensitive on which no building would be allowed. What a farce.

Every year, including this year, another prefab has been added and the playground area has been shrinking. In March of this year the OPW, after seven years, announced it had agreed a price with a developer for a school site in Kill. However, it now transpires that the deal is contingent on more land being zoned and even more houses built before the contract can be signed. This practice of holding the community to ransom, a form of community blackmail, is to be condemned and should be outlawed by making the compulsory acquisition of land for schools a legal possibility. In Government, the Labour Party will positively examine this option.

We can now see that in Kill the Department and successive Ministers failed over a seven year period to find a site and build the required school, and there is very little light at the end of that tunnel. Meanwhile the children of Kill are condemned to schooling in substandard and overcrowded conditions in the middle of a traffic island while other children cannot even get a place there. This is hardly to cherish all the children of the nation equally or fulfil the constitutional guarantee to our children.

My second case study concerns the primary schools of Naas, the capital town of County Kildare which has seen rapid growth in the past ten years. This growth was planned, with predictable increases in the number of children and required school places. There are 2,375 pupils in the five existing national schools serving the town, with 400 of these accommodated in prefabs or so-called temporary accommodation.

These schools are bursting at the seams and cannot expand any further. A new 16-classroom school has been completed and has two infant classes. With the completion of the new school, the long-suffering parents and their children thought that some level of relief, some salvation from the dire situation, was at hand, but their hopes have been dashed. The Minister, Deputy Hanafin, has decided that the new school is to remain empty except for the infant classes. The school, Scoil Bríde, will not be fully utilised until 2013, with only one class added each year — that is the Minister's decision, which I received in writing from her yesterday. This means that in 2007 some 14 state-of-the-art classrooms, with all the ancillary facilities and built with taxpayers' money, will be vacant except for a security company which will mind it while 400 children are forced to finish their primary education in so-called temporary accommodation. For most of these children, there is nothing temporary about this accommodation; it is the only type they have ever known. They have been and continue to be deprived by the action of the Minister.

I rest my case, which is well demonstrated by the examples of Kill and Naas, one a small village and the other the capital town of the county.

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