Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I do not want to pre-empt what the Minister of State might say. I confirm that I spoke to the Minister last Friday after the public meeting that the three of us attended. She confirmed to me and the principal that she would meet him in the next three to four weeks. That meeting is confirmed and arranged. I suppose that is a first step. I will not dwell on the history because the two previous speakers have outlined it. Over the last number of years in this House, I have always pointed to the deficit of ASD classes in Ballincollig, and it was not even in our electoral area at that point, such is the difficulty for parents there in sourcing ASD places for their children.

Historically, people in Ballincollig would be farming their children out to outlying villages like Ovens, Farran, Dripsey and Inishcarra on minibuses and taxiing them all around the place. The problems in Ballincollig have been known for a long time at departmental level and locally in Cork.

From this debate, and I do not know if this is included in the Minister of State's response, I would like to have it reaffirmed that the Minister is going to have this meeting. As I said, she verbally committed to do so. The most important thing after that, as was previously alluded to, is that a significant amount of work will have to be done on the site. There is probably a two-pronged response to this issue. There will be a medium-term to long-term response in terms of the demolition and rebuilding. There is also the issue of what we are going to do in the short term, which may include looking at modular buildings in the interim while the larger-scale project is under way.

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