Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for his reply. The Department of Education and Skills has a very important role in emergency planning. Some 24 hours before this hurricane hit the country, we had information at our disposal and yet we allowed schools to open the following morning and children from as young as five years of age were put into a lethal environment, which was totally unnecessary. Who in the meteorological service decided not to relay this information so that schools could be told to close? What have we learned from that to ensure it will not happen again? That is the crux of the issue.

I appreciate there is a circular but no county manager will send out a notification to close a school. There needs to be very clear protocols in place in the Department which can be given to school managers and principals telling them exactly what they should do. For instance, is it safe to ask parents by text message to collect their child in the middle of a hurricane, putting them at risk by asking them to travel on roads on which they do not know what kind of debris they will find? The child may well be safer left at school.

Luckily we are not in the throes of winter but this issue needs to be taken much more seriously. The Minister knows as well as I do that teaching principals in rural areas, which were the areas worst affected by this, have a million other things on their minds, but if they got a text message from a centralised service the night before telling them to close their schools the next day due to a red warning alert, it would be much more effective than a circular asking them to forward their details to the county manager who probably has been moved and has not taken down their names in the first place.

This is a very serious issue. We put children, their parents, their teachers and their minders at unnecessary risk when we knew 24 hours beforehand that there was a red alert and that a hurricane was going to hit the west coast. As a State, we did nothing about it. Luckily nobody was killed but will we be able to say that in the future? We need proper and robust protocols in place to ensure we are not putting vulnerable people at unnecessary risk.

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