Mary O'Rourke (Fianna Fail)

I strongly resent the percentage of money which is given to professional surveyors, architects, second teams of architects, etc. It takes a huge amount of money out of the budget for primary school building and in many cases good jobs can be done neatly and well with much less expenditure. There is no need for that kind of money to be spent. It is different when building science laboratories, technical drawing rooms and domestic science rooms, which require special accommodation and equipment. That is quite understandable. The accommodation is simpler and much easier to build in primary schools, but devoting lots of money to huge teams of architects is counter-productive and eats into the primary school budget. The team at the Department of Education and Science now, headed by the Minister, Deputy Noel Dempsey, and also comprising the Ministers of State, Deputies Síle de Valera and Brian Lenihan, will, together with Department officials, do its very best with the budget available for 2003.