Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

-----the policy of the Department. It was not under my predecessors either. The reason is that we just do not have the capital funds to build precisely the schools that each parent wants. That is the difficulty. The former Minister, Mr. Ruairí Quinn's attempt was a genuine one to, as Deputy Shortall rightly said, get a school to close and amalgamate and to get a building released and for that become a new school. Unfortunately, as the Deputy can see, the church schools, the ten that were opened here, were not always opened in church schools volunteering their buildings. They did not emerge that way. Other public buildings had to be used to supplement what was coming through from the church in those instances. When those buildings were made available, they were made available and the school had a building within which it could expand. They have made an application to my Department to see if we would consider allowing them go beyond the building in which they are operating in or the capacity that they have been assigned under that process and expand. We are examining that process.

As to whether we can do better, I believe we can do better. We are now instituting a process under the education training boards, ETBs, which are local bodies in each community, to identify areas where it is believed there is a demand and to do a survey of preschool children to establish a level of demand. I refer to approaching this in a different way-----

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