Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputies for raising this issue. The school meals programme provides funding towards the provision of food to some 1,506 schools and organisations benefitting 230,000 children. The objective of the programme is to provide regular, nutritious food to children to enable them to take full advantage of the education provided to them. The programme is an important component of policies to encourage school attendance and extra educational achievement.

The Government has provided €65 million for the school meals programme this year. As part of budget 2019, funding was provided for a pilot scheme from September 2019 providing hot school meals in primary schools at a cost of €1 million for 2019 and €2.5 million in 2020. The pilot involves 37 schools benefitting 6,744 students for the 2019-20 academic year and was aimed primarily at schools with no on-site cooking facilities. The extension of the hot school meals programme was a priority for the Minister and myself and as part of budget 2021 we announced that an additional €5.5 million would be provided to extend the provision of hot school meals to an additional 35,000 primary school children who were, at the time, in receipt of the cold lunch option. That represents a sixfold increase in the number of pupils receiving hot school meals.

The Department issued invitations for expressions of interest to 705 primary schools in November 2020 and a total of 281 expressions of interest were received in respect of 52,000 children. The 35,000 places were allocated to each local authority area, based on the number of children applied for by local authority area as a percentage of the total number. A minimum of one school for each local authority area was selected. As a result of this process, 189 of the 281 schools that submitted an expression of interest were selected.

The Minister and I are absolutely committed to continuing to grow the hot school meals element and building further on the significant extension announced as part of the recent budget. I have spoken to the Minister and know she is actively working to find a solution so that it is possible to include those schools that were unsuccessful in a hot school meals programme this year. The Minister and I are absolutely committed to the school meals programme.

It is important to mention that over the course of the pandemic, the Minister has continued to support schools and children with the continued availability of school meals. In addition to the provision of meals during the school term, the Minister also extended the funding so that meals could be provided during the summer period last year, as well as during Christmas, Easter and other periods of school closure. I assure Deputies that everything is being done to ensure that we can support as many schools as possible.

Again, I thank Deputies for raising this important matter. I have a particular interest in this issue as I oversee the roadmap for social inclusion. We recently decided to establish a working group on food poverty. That working group will be meeting soon and hot school meals will certainly be on its agenda. On the question of the lottery, demand outstripped the budget allocation for the programme. Unfortunately, the best way that we could find for allocating limited resources was a lottery system which I accept is inadequate. We need to meet the demand that exists for the programme.

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