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

I thank the Minister for her response. I would be interested to know if she could forward to me information on the school planning areas. She mentioned there are 314 of them, and I ask her to forward the details of the east Cork one to me at some stage. We know that many schools now have got extensions to extensions, and they are at capacity. My concern is that in five, six or ten years' time we will be in real trouble because of the massive and very welcome growth in housing in the area. I ask the Minister to ask her officials to look at this situation again in light of the recent progress report I mentioned, which Cork County Council published only this week. It makes fantastic reading in the context of the development and building of houses and so on, which are so badly needed, but in parallel with this endeavour we need schools. The existing schools are full. They have got extensions to extensions in some of them, while at the same time the population is growing. If we have 5,000 houses and if each of those were to have one child, then that would be 5,000 extra children. This equates to a lot of school places.

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