Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I want to raise the issue of the need for temporary accommodation for both Temple Carrig School in Greystones, and Blessington Community College in Blessington. It is nine weeks until students will return to secondary school for the 2023-24 academic year, and neither Temple Carrig School nor Blessington Community College has sufficient accommodation to house the intake that is due this August and September. Both schools have been searching and asking the Department for information as to when the promised and committed temporary accommodation will be made available to them. As the Minister of State can imagine, the schools, the parents and the students are getting very concerned about this delay.

Temple Carrig School has agreed to take extra students in since 2020. It has increased its capacity significantly and, as a result, the Department committed to it that it would provide it with four temporary classrooms to accommodate those students. The school ran two procurement processes that were requested by the Department in order to obtain that accommodation and those classrooms, and each time the school was told the Department had either changed the goalposts or did not agree with the procurement process. The school has therefore spent a year doing what the Department has asked it to do, and each time the Department has changed the process and changed its opinion on it. As a result, the school now does not have accommodation for September because of difficulties, flaws and delays within the Department's process. This has nothing to do with the school; no fault at all is attached to it. It did everything correctly and did everything the Department asked it to do, but the Department changed its mind as to what it wanted in that procurement.

The Department has said subsequently that it would obtain accommodation from another school in Donabate and move it to Temple Carrig School but it still cannot say when that will happen. All it is saying is that it will probably be after the first mid-term break. That is not acceptable. It is not acceptable for the Department to work with a school, to ask it to take in extra students, to make a commitment that accommodation will be provided for them, to request that the school put a huge amount of effort into running procurement processes, to change the goalposts and now, when the school is left without sufficient accommodation, not even to tell the school when the temporary accommodation will be put in. What is even more remarkable is that there is temporary accommodation in a neighbouring school that one could spend literally half a day moving up to Temple Carrig School, yet the Department wants these prefabs to come from Donabate, which will take a number of months for some reason.

The Minister of State's Department has had three weeks to prepare the response to this Topical Issue because it has been three weeks since I first raised this. I really hope the Minister of State has come to me today with dates as to when both these schools will have their temporary accommodation because parents and schools need certainty on that.

See this speech in context