Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for his reply. I hope he is at the cusp of making some progress. He said he hopes to progress the project to architectural planning at an early stage. I have given a commitment to the parents and the teachers. I will be back to the Minister every month about this issue. I ask him to get the work started. Even when it is started, it will have to go through the planning and tendering processes. Therefore, it is still a long way off. I ask the Minister to allow the school to proceed to architectural planning as quickly as possible.

As the Minister just mentioned, he has sanctioned approval for another prefab. Five of the seven classrooms in the school are now prefabs. They are for children with the most profound intellectual disabilities in the country.

The school site is extraordinary in that the HSE owns the site, the Muiriosa Foundation owns the school buildings and the Department owns the five prefabs on the site, so it is a complete mixum-gatherum. Nevertheless, the Department must take ownership of this project.

I visited the school with the chairman of the board of management and the principal. Since September the school has lost its sensory room to facilitate a class. The pupils with autism cannot use the physical education hall because of over-stimulation due to people going through it. If one understands the nature of the profound disabilities involved one can understand why that is the case. The pupils need absolute quiet. We had to tiptoe in and out of many of the rooms last week lest we upset the children. The corridor to the nurse's room is cluttered with equipment, making access to the room difficult. In fact, there are two nurses on the staff, paid by the Muiriosa Foundation. That indicates the type of school we are discussing. There are 40 pupils in the school and the full complement of teachers and SNAs, but when it is necessary to have two nurses on the staff it shows what a special case it is.

As I said, there are 5,000 children in great new schools in Portlaoise, aside from the couple that are being examined due to the difficulty that has arisen in recent days with school buildings. The St. Francis Special School will have a site for building soon and another secondary school is getting a new site. However, these 40 children are being left in limbo in the meantime and I urge the Minister to move on this. I am not here to fight but to plead on behalf of those children, their parents and the staff.

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