Michael Moynihan (Cork North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to discuss this very important issue on the floor of the Dáil. It is projected that the Presentation Convent national school will experience huge growth by 2014 or 2015. At present the enrolment figure is approximately 240 and it is projected this will rise to 289 in September 2013 and to 340 by September 2016. It has received one extra mainstream classroom teacher, but its immediate problem is a shortfall in accommodation, and a mainstream classroom, a language room and a resource room are required. In 2007 and 2008 the national school received a grant to purchase two prefabricated classrooms. At the time, the board of management thought it would have been very bad value to accept money for prefabricated classrooms, so it applied to the Department to be allowed to raise money locally to be used with the grant to build permanent classrooms. The Department and the then Minister, Batt O'Keeffe, were convinced to go with this scheme. It was a pilot scheme, being the first such scheme in the country. The school went ahead and provided extra classrooms with the money allocated by the Department for prefabricated classrooms. This has been huge value for money.

I visited the school recently and it has enormous problems. It got the best value for money possible from the last tranche of funding it received from the Department. The board of management involved a very good local engineer and much good work was done with the builders. Now it has a short-term problem and difficulties will arise in September 2013. It has been allocated an extra mainstream classroom teacher but there is no room for that teacher. The projected enrolments mean a huge problem will occur in 2016. What does the Department of Education and Skills envisage for the school? This issue requires urgent attention. I understand inspectors from the Department visited the school recently to discuss the problem. Short-term and long-term problems exist with regard to accommodation. We need to take a holistic approach. The Department will throw money at a short-term problem to try to sort it out but the long-term issue needs to be considered. The Department needs to examine the school's space and ground. The board of management is very innovative and this has been proved in the past. In agreement with the Department it can stretch a euro as far as possible. The short-term and long-term problems need to be examined because this rural school will experience a huge growth rate in the coming years.

See this speech in context