Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I take the opportunity to acknowledge the child-centred approach of St. Anne's special school. I read up about the school in advance, and it is to be commended on how it does things and works with children. I could read out all the statistics outlining the scale of the hot school meals programme. It is very large-scale programme and we want to cover all schools eventually. The nature of that means that it works in a particular way. It does not fund the staff and if we were to get into that realm, it would become a very different thing and would become more complex. At its core, is a very different policy direction from what the Deputy is proposing.

We provide funding to schools around the country to go to the market and get suppliers to bring food in. In many ways, that has developed because of how schools are set up in Ireland as opposed to the setup in other countries. Our schools tend not to have kitchens or cooking facilities. In order to reach as many people as possible, the hot school meals programme has developed in the way that it has. In many respects, it has been quite effective. As the Deputy acknowledged and as I mentioned, there is flexibility within that model. We have facilitated Ennistymon within the overall model. The Deputy is talking about a very different model, which would not have allowed us to reach as many schools, had we done it that way.

Notwithstanding that, what St. Anne's wants to do is commendable. As to how that might be pursued, I am not so sure. I know from my work in the Department of Rural and Community Development that it funds staff through the community services programme, through community organisations which are involved in the provision of meals to communities - I am not so sure about schools. Certainly, in community settings, that happens. I am not saying that is doable here but perhaps there is another way of facilitating what they want to do, which is ultimately the best for the children as well. I am open to ideas and a discussion on how that might be done. However, I cannot see how the model we have in the Department can fit what the Deputy is proposing, at least in this school year. It would require a significant change in policy direction to facilitate that.

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