Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am less interested in the party political slagging match and much more interested in reassuring parents, families, teachers and principals that we can fix this. We are talking about a different era of standards and inspection systems which have changed quite dramatically since 2014. We are talking about pre-Grenfell, after which the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, undertook the inspection of public buildings to make sure that mistakes made in the UK were not made here. What we are focused on now – I thank Opposition spokespersons for their assistance on this yesterday - is trying to ensure we can reassure staff and children that we will put contingency plans in place and prioritise their safety.

The Taoiseach and the Minister for Education and Skills visited two schools this morning to send a clear signal but the Government will prioritise this and ensure all of the schools built by this company will be inspected in the coming days. This will allow us to understand where there are problems, fix them and put contingencies in place for the schoolchildren and their families for the time it might take.

There is a list of schools which are yet to be inspected. There are grounds to expect some of them will be fine. Some of them will not need to take children and staff outside of school while some repairs might have to take place. There are other schools where there may be dangers to which we need to respond with safety as the first priority.

I ask Members to work with us. Rather than trying to organise protests, we need to organise a calm whereby we can work with principals, boards of management and parents to ensure that, after the mid-term break, if certain schools are going to be discommoded for a temporary period of time, that we do that in as efficient a way as possible that prioritises children and staff in terms of safety and education. That is what we need to do together. There will be plenty of time after we do that for a political debate on what happened, how it happened, can we learn lessons and make changes to ensure it does not happen again.

Schools which are being built today, in terms of independent inspection and certification, are operating to a very different model on-site than what happened before 2014. We should not pretend such progress has not been made.

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