Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

One of the things the Minister needs to do this afternoon is to commit to ensuring the school transport system does not descend into the same shambles this year that she presided over last year. I do not want to have to experience the number of calls, emails and meetings with frantic parents we had to experience last year. I hope the Minister can commit to ensuring that the system functions next year in the way that it should in advance of the kinds of reforms Deputy Kelly proposed. However, I will limit my contribution today and focus on the school building programme. I will illustrate the case by referencing two particular schools and their individual stories because they illustrate the journey some schools have been on over recent years and a real dysfunction at the heart of how the Department of Education's building unit does its business.

Let us take the case of Drogheda Educate Together Secondary School, for example. According to figures the Minister provided to me a few weeks ago, more than €11 million has been spent on temporary accommodation for this school while it waits, year after year, for a badly needed permanent home. It will be three or four more years before a spade strikes the ground on that project and that is only if it is not shelved at the last minute as 58 other school projects were this month. That school opened in 2019 and, four years later, it is no closer to having the permanent home it was promised. An application for planning permission is due to be submitted shortly. Meanwhile, an ever-increasing number of modular units are being funded to cater for the growing school population at the cost of the eye-watering figure of €11 million I have mentioned. I have said from the outset that it would have made financial sense for the Department to have run the lengthy planning process for the permanent school alongside the provision of the temporary accommodation so that the two projects could progress side-by-side. That did not happen, however. It seems the Department of Education is immune to considering common sense proposals.

I raised two weeks ago the experience of Ardee Educate Together National School. It caters for more than 200 pupils in what I would describe as a mishmash of prefabs, a 200-year-old building that is not fit for purpose and - would you believe it - a converted warehouse. That school is operating on two sides of a very busy road. I remind the Minister that this is a primary school. Construction workers should be on site in Ardee right now. Construction was due to start the week after St. Patrick's Day. The construction company was ready to go but, with days to go, the Department emailed the school to say that the project had been shelved. Remarkably, when this was followed up on, officials in the Department advised the school principal to contact the local Deputy. There is no transparency and no accountability in the Minister's Department. That is an utter disgrace and no way to run a Department.

We have been told that many schools have been put on hold for an undefined period of time and that works will begin at an indefinite date in the future. I will remind the Minister of what we managed to do at a time when this country had no money whatsoever. It was not just his sensibilities as an architect, but as a politician as well, that led the then Minister for Education and Skills, Ruairi Quinn, to ensure in 2011 that we started to build schools again rather than wasting money by providing the limited resources we had to the prefab companies, which were the only operations winning from that kind of policy. Here we are at a time of plenty, when an Exchequer surplus of €5.3 billion was recorded last year, and we cannot build schools that were promised many years ago. In 2011, the then Minister, Ruairi Quinn, signed off on a new school for the Ardee Educate Together National School. We succeeded in building schools between 2011 and 2016 but now, at a time of plenty, the Minister cannot manage to turn the sod on schools that were promised many years ago. We need a firm commitment from the Minister as to the future of this local school that she will build the permanent home its students and staff deserve. Indeed, this motion calls on the Government to give that same commitment for all of the 58 shelved projects around the country.

As the Labour Party spokesperson on public expenditure and reform, I have been following this closely and we know that the Department gives a burden sharing commitment in respect of important public projects, which is quite extraordinary. This means the Department will cover some inflation-related costs for various priority national development plan projects this year. Where stand the 58 schools in that regard?

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