David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his very positive response and the Department who prepared the response for him. I note, in particular, that he said that officials from his Department will be addressing the issue with each of the patrons this week with a view to finding a workable solution to ensure that no students will be without a place for September 2023.

I warmly welcome that commitment but the only problem is that I understand that the schools are on holidays at the moment and are closed. I just hope that they have been acting on this because I have been flagging this for quite a while.

This brings light to the bigger question here, where we are facing this issue every single year. We need a situation where if a parent accepts a place in one school, the child is removed from the waiting list in all other schools. Whether one uses personal public service numbers, PPSNs, or whatever I do not know, but it would certainly help the problem if the parent were told that initially.

There is also the right to appeal and parents are not aware of that either. The Department is scrambling to find out what the true figure is but if the right to appeal was there, the section 29 appeals would then be in the Department and it would know exactly how many students were then without places because those parents would have appealed the fact that their children did not have a place in a school.

I must also again pay tribute to the principals and the staff in all of the schools who work so hard. I note that Carrigtwohill post-primary school, which I believe will be open at Christmas time, is already full and at capacity and is currently in temporary accommodation. This brings me back to the other point which I wanted to make this morning, which is about the need for another second level school in east Cork. I said this here last week and I point to the fact that there is a large Educate Together primary school in Midleton with, I believe, 700 students. There is a growing demand for that kind of school in the area. If another school will be built in east Cork, and I believe it should, we know that it took the school in Carrigtwohill 12 years to be built from inception to the present and, as I have already said, we hope that it will be open around Christmas time.

The need for another school is very important in this area, as it is a growing one with many houses being built in east Cork. It is close to the city and, as I see that the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, has joined us, I will mention that there will be a battery-operated rail line very soon, which will run every ten minutes. That will also be really good. There are a number of issues here, therefore, that need to be addressed.

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