Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I want to thank Deputy O’Rourke for raising this issue. As he rightly said, I am very familiar with it. I did give apologies to a public meeting that I could not attend last year. I fully support the Deputy’s proposal. I was at a public meeting three years ago when I put forward the exact same proposal. I tried to get action on it then. Unfortunately, people were not listening at that time, when the school was open. At that time, it could have been saved. It is a disgrace that it was allowed to close. I completely agree with Deputy O’Rourke.

St. Finian's national school at Clonalvy is a former national school which closed on the basis that no pupils were enrolled for the 2019-20 school year. The Bishop of Meath took that decision at that time. If I may be honest, this is a pattern that I fear in other areas where there are two or three schools in a parish, one becomes the dominant or popular school and pupils start to peel away from the other school. That puts pressure on the school that pupils have peeled away from. That is exactly what happened in Clonalvy. People started moving to the other school in the parish in Ardcath, which extended its buildings. There are also other schools close by in Naul. I see that happening in other areas too and I am very concerned about it. The problem is that I do not see the church’s patrons dividing the catchments within parishes to protect all the schools. The Department of Education tends not to deal with those issues at that grassroots level. It is really left to boards and management. However, we all need to keep an eye on this. As the Deputy rightly said, St. Finian’s National School is not in the ownership of the Department. On that basis, the Department accepted the termination of a small charging lease, which dated from 1953 in respect of the former school property. I do not have further details on that.

The Government and the Department divides the country into 314 school planning areas to try to plan for school demands. To be fair, that has been working much better in recent years. Project Ireland 2040 also has population and housing targets. They inform the Department’s projections of school place requirements. At national level, primary enrolments peaked in 2018 and are forecast to decline overall by 20% in the next ten years, despite overall population growth. However, there will of course be local variations. We all know that. Indeed, the arrival of Ukrainian children has added to the pressure on school places. It has added to primary school places and has allowed for more teachers to be employed in certain areas.

Clonalvy, as it happens, is in the Ashbourne school planning area. The Department’s most recent demographic projections indicate a decline in primary enrolments in that planning area over the next ten to 15 years. This is on the basis that the national and local plans are looking towards Drogheda, Dunboyne and Navan as areas of population growth. The village, as we know, is close to the Balbriggan school planning area and to Stamullen. Again, the forecasts for that are similar.

In the school planning area of Ashbourne, for example, which I know is not directly adjacent to Clonalvy but it is part of the planning area, new schools are being opened to cater for demand. The Department will continue to keep the primary school place requirements in the area under review. This will be informed by current and planned residential development, the housing and population targets and the enrolment of children from Ukraine. The Department engages with a range of stakeholders in this respect. I personally undertake to work with the Deputy on this, because I think the school should not have closed. There was an opportunity three or four years to keep it open. I thought it was a perfect candidate for divestment from the Church. At the time, I did not seem to be getting interest in that.

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