Mary Wallace (Meath East, Fianna Fail)

I thank the Deputy for providing us with the opportunity to outline to the House the position of the Department of Education and Science regarding the proposed building project for Our Lady's school in Templeogue Road, Dublin.

This school is an all-girls' post-primary school with a current enrolment of 708 pupils. The Department intends to refurbish the school and to extend it to cater for a long-term projected enrolment of 800 pupils.

As the Minister for Education and Science has explained to the House previously, all applications for large scale capital funding are assessed in the Department against published prioritisation criteria. Each project is assigned a band rating under these criteria which reflects the type of works required and the urgency attaching to them. A band rating of 2.4 has been assigned to the project for Our Lady's school which reflects the fact that the building needs refurbishment and that while it has an accommodation deficit this is not as substantial as higher band-rated projects.

The project for Our Lady's school was listed on the 2007 school building programme to proceed to tender and construction. It is currently at stage 4-5 of architectural planning which means that planning permission has been granted and tender documents have been prepared. The next stage would be to allow the project to proceed to tender.

Unfortunately the Minister is not in a position to give the go-ahead for any more school building projects, including that for Our Lady's school, at the present time. Indeed, as he has previously said, he will not be making any decision on further capital expenditure until he has completed a review of the Department's spending plans for 2008. This process is currently under way and the Minister expects it will take a number of months to complete.

The Minister understands that some schools will be disappointed that their projects will not be proceeding as quickly as they might have hoped but, it would be disingenuous to create an impression to the contrary.

The Deputy will appreciate that the Minister has to manage his Department's capital budget in a responsible manner and in so doing must ensure that funding is targeted at the schools most in need. This is the reason the Department introduced prioritisation criteria for large-scale building projects, which were formulated following consultation with the education partners.

Thousands of building projects were carried out under the last national development plan, providing new and modernised educational infrastructure and thousands more will be carried out under the new NDP. However, there has to be an order as to how this happens and a realisation that not all building projects can proceed at the same time.

The extent of the demand on the capital budget is enormous providing as it does, accommodation for new communities together with accommodation for the unprecedented number of extra teachers which the Government has put into the system. The Department has also carried out substantial and major improvement works to hundreds of schools throughout the country, in an effort to address the historic under-investment in school buildings and this process will continue.

This cannot be achieved overnight——

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