Michael Finucane (Fine Gael)

It is. If you want a contrast, just go across to the other side of Adare to the St. Nicholas school, which is located in a building over 600 years old. The then Minister for Education and Science, Deputy Martin, promised them a new school in 1999 but they are still waiting. I see from the list on the Department's website that the school has not even got to the architectural planning stage. The 70-plus pupils deserve the chance of a new building because the structure they are in is primitive. That is symptomatic of many schools around the country.

The Minister for Finance, Deputy McCreevy, deserves at this stage the title Mac the Knife. The title used to be applied to another Minister years ago. The amount of money earmarked for capital expenditure on schools this year is static. If we take construction inflation into consideration in addition to general inflation, there is a cut of 10%. The school building unit of the Department does tremendous work with limited resources, but in many cases it is merely applying a sticking plaster in trying to remedy defects within existing schools. Thousands of children are going into school wearing their overcoats in terrible conditions in the winter. It is a shocking indictment, considering the excessive expenditure of the past few years, that those circumstances exist. Now we are in the situation of having to claw back revenue.

What is the future for many of those schools? We recently had published on the Department website the entire list of schools at different stages of architectural planning and so on. Some schools are not even on the list. Like other Senators, I could provide a list of these schools in my own county. It is totally unfair, and there remains much to do.

The capitation grant is, I think, €101 per pupil for primary schools and €230 for second level schools. Much of the funding for schools is now raised locally. There has been a huge increase in the cost of insurance and heating oil. In many cases very good committees are getting together and trying to raise funds, but many of them are finding it more difficult as time goes on.