Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

I am pleased to have the opportunity of raising this issue again. It concerns a new school for Gaelscoil Bharra in Cabra, an issue I have been raising virtually every year I have been a Member of the Dáil. Gaelscoil Bharra is located just off Fassaugh Avenue and has been in prefabricated buildings since it was founded 13 years ago. I am blue in the face raising the issue with the Minister and trying to determine when some movement will take place on the part of the Department of Education and Science to replace the prefabricated buildings with a new school, which the children and the parents have been requesting all those years.

Recent figures indicated that 40,000 pupils are educated in prefabricated buildings but those prefabs would be extensions to the original school building. In this case the entire school building is prefabricated. This has been the case for the past 13 years and it is not good enough. During the winter time the buildings are cold, damp and unsuitable for children. During the summer time they are too hot, and when it rains there are pools of water everywhere, including in the yard, and toilets block up. It is a nightmare for everybody concerned — the staff, the pupils and their parents.

I raise this issue more than once a year and receive a variation of the same answer, namely, that the Department of Education and Science is doing its best and that it is on the lookout for a site for a permanent school but, strangely, 13 years later those people from the Department who have been out searching for a site still have not discovered one. I hope this might be the night the Minister of State will give me the good news that new eagle-eyed civil servants in the Department of Education and Science have at last discovered a suitable site.

Meanwhile, parents are concerned about their children's health and the conditions under which they are educated. The children themselves suffer physically and educationally from the lack of good quality services. Also, the parents and the staff are constantly fundraising to try to plug some of the gaps in maintaining the unsuitable buildings that are now well past their sell-by date.

We are at the end of the construction boom and as we move into something of a recession and there is no longer an emphasis on the construction of residential dwellings, there may be scope for moving the construction industry into providing much needed infrastructure of this nature. I am sure many developers would be delighted to get contracts to build schools. Those contracts would not be that much different from the type of contracts they would get for housing estates. This might be an opportunity for the Government to retain its spending power to do whatever borrowing is necessary. It is the way to go. There is the opportunity to do that and to try to keep the construction industry moving. If that is the decision of the Government, it will be able to address the problem of the large number of prefabs and the need to have permanent school structures constructed.

I have come into this House too often asking that something suitable in the line of an educational facility be provided for children who should be cherished by the nation, as we all know. That is not the case with these particular children. The Minister of State might have some good information for me tonight.

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