Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State's outline of the process. In replies that constituency colleagues and I have been receiving since last year, it was promised that we would be at this stage many months ago. It is frustrating that an "accelerated" process has been anything but accelerated. I have very few focal Gaeilge, but the Minister of State would want to be telling the officials in the Department of Education "go tapaidh". Last May, the Minister informed the House that the tender for the design phase would take 12 weeks. It is now 12 months later. That is not good enough. While I welcome that the design team has been appointed and that the initial stages have commenced, the school is concerned that the length of time it has taken us to reach this point is a signifier of what is to come. We cannot have that.

This school was in the ownership of the De La Salle Brothers. The State spent €1 million renting the site from the De La Salle Brothers before purchasing it in 2019. The school has only come about because of parent power, with parents coming together to campaign for the Gaelscoil. My message to the departmental officials is that the school's parents will not go away quietly. It has taken too long to reach this stage, although I accept that we now have on the cards a 16-classroom extension, which is welcome. I acknowledge the difficult decisions being considered - whether to retrofit the existing building, what impact that would have on the school's operations, whether to demolish the old school and build in parallel, etc. These are all big questions, but we need to get going and ensure that no class in this generation has to wait another five or six years for the school to be in place.

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