Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. I take his point completely and will bring it back to the Minister. The school meals programme provides funding towards the provision of food to 1,506 schools and organisations, benefiting 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 commitment of the Government and is a key component of policies to encourage school attendance and extra educational achievement.

The Government has provided €68.1 million for the school meals programme this year. In recent years, entry to the programme has been confined to DEIS schools, in addition to schools identified as having levels of concentrated disadvantage that would benefit from the school meals programme. Prior to the introduction of DEIS in 2005, all schools and organisations that were part of one of a number of the Department of Education and Skills' initiatives for disadvantaged schools, including Breaking the Cycle, Giving Children an Even Break, the disadvantaged area scheme, home school community liaison and the school completion programme, were eligible to participate in the programme.

Budget 2022 provided funding for all DEIS schools currently in the programme. Any provision to extend the programme to schools newly added to the DEIS programme will need to be considered as part of the budgetary process. That is what the Deputy is asking for but I accept that there is a time issue involved. We are absolutely committed to continuing to grow the school meals programme, particularly the hot school meals element, building further on the significant extensions announced in the last few budgets.

As part of budget 2019, funding was provided for a pilot scheme from September 2019, providing hot school meals in primary schools. The pilot involved 37 schools, benefiting 6,744 children for the 2019-20 academic year, and was aimed primarily at schools with no on-site cooking facilities. In budget 2021, we announced that an additional €5.5 million would be allocated to extend the provision of hot school meals to an additional 35,000 primary school children currently receiving the cold lunch option. In budget 2022, we provided for hot school meals to be extended from January 2022 to the 81 additional DEIS schools that submitted an expression of interest but were not selected as part of the extension to 35,000 children in budget 2021. That change came in on 1 January this year. The number of children currently in receipt of hot school meals is 54,236. This represents almost 10% of the total primary school population. There are no secondary school children in receipt of hot school meals as the programme is aimed at primary schools with no on-site cooking facilities. We are actively working on this issue and I assure the Deputy that everything is being done to ensure we can support as many schools as possible. I again thank the Deputy for raising the matter.

We have heard from schools that when the hot school meals programme is available in some schools in a region, it is a disadvantage to schools that do not receive it. There are many provincial areas where there could be a few schools in a large provincial town and some have it but some do not. It is becoming an issue for enrolment.

I acknowledge the great work done by Marcus Rashford, the Manchester United and England soccer player, in this area, even though it is across the water. He went out on a limb to promote this issue last year and ensure children would get the meals at home during the Covid period. He helped raise the profile of this topic, not just in the UK but here in Ireland as well.

See this speech in context