Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)

It is a rainy day, and on rainy days staff in Coolmine Community School in my constituency, Dublin West, have to set out between 40 and 50 plastic buckets across the school to deal with water flowing into corridors, classrooms, toilets and offices. That water flows from over 100 leaks in the roof of the school. Coolmine is a big school, with almost a thousand pupils, and has provided top-class education for students across Dublin 15 for decades. It is, however, an old school. The building is now over 50 years old and is literally falling apart. I have known this school well over many years and have had the opportunity to visit it twice in the past six months. On the second occasion, it was raining and I saw a teacher trying to divert a rivulet of water coming in through a classroom ceiling away from the electrics for the white screen in that classroom. That is thousands of euro worth of damage risked in just one classroom, and the same thing is happening all across the school. Beyond the health and safety concerns to which these conditions give rise, there is the disruption to education whereby teachers are distracted by having to manage the inflow of water, and, in particular, the disruption to the normal, everyday activities of the school. Almost 1,000 students walk the corridors of the school every 40 minutes, and they literally have to navigate an obstacle course between all the buckets on the floors. TDs come in here and overstate matters. I am not overstating this. Each of the corridors has five, six or seven buckets laid across it just to collect the water.

The school's management team, the principal and deputy principals, has been proactive and submitted an emergency works application for the roof in November. That is application No. 3484. They got a visit from the Department's emergency works team in March. The Department thought about it and then asked the school for a full survey. That full survey is in and now the school is waiting to hear back from the Department in terms of the outcome. The roof is still leaking. Leaving certificate examinations are taking place today, but someone is probably putting out buckets in Coolmine right now. The school has complied with all the Department's requests for documentation and has followed all the procedures for emergency works applications.

This is on the Department. The Department has not met its timelines in terms of the responses it has given to the school management team. The state of the roof in Coolmine is known to the Department and to the Minister, Deputy McEntee. The Minister visited the school in February of this year. She contacted me earlier. I know she cannot be here to address this matter directly, and I appreciate her contacting me. I hope the Minister of State, Deputy O'Sullivan, has some good news for the students in Coolmine, the teachers, the other staff and the parents. I do not want to hear about lengthy assessments. I do not want to hear that the school has a load of follow-ups to bring through. I do not want to hear about the school having to go back to a previous contractor. I want the Minister of State to confirm to me that the school's emergency works application, No. 3484, has been granted and that it will have the opportunity to go rapidly to tender, get this work done, or as much of it as can be done, over the summer holidays, and be ready for students coming back in September.

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