Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

——which is an increase of 14% on the 2004 allocation. The Members will be aware that I have made a number of different announcements regarding buildings. They include the following: 141 major building projects which are already on site and a further 28 due to commence in the coming weeks; a total of 122 major school building projects which will prepare tenders and move to construction this year; and a total of 192 primary schools which have been invited to take part in the small and rural schools initiative and the devolved scheme for providing additional accommodation. Up to 120 schools have been given approval to rent temporary premises pending delivery of a permanent solution to their long-term accommodation needs and 43 schools have been authorised to start architectural planning of their major projects. A total of 590 schools were given approval for small scale projects under the summer works scheme and I hope to announce more tomorrow. A total of 124 schools have been approved to move through the architectural planning process with immediate effect. Undoubtedly, the schools building and modernisation programme has seen both an increase in overall funding and major improvements in the administration of funding.

However, another announcement, which does not refer to school buildings but which has had a direct impact on schools such as St. Patrick's boys school, is the announcement of 660 extra teachers to deal with special needs and resource teaching. The easy thing to do would have been to decide not to supply the teaching resources until the buildings were ready. Unfortunately perhaps, children needed to receive the teaching allocation. Consequently, I have provided the teachers even though the Department is aware that there are schools and circumstances where they do not have bright new classrooms. Surely it was more important to put the resource teaching and special needs teachers in place so that the educational needs of the children could be met. This is what has happened in some schools. While some schools are attempting to find space for those teachers, they would prefer to have the teachers rather than empty buildings.

St. Patrick's school is one such school. This school, with 90 pupils, has a principal, three mainstream teachers and a permanently-based resource teacher. Enrolments have decreased slightly from 112 to 90 pupils but I can understand that the school authorities would like to have space for the resource teacher. However, every school in the country will face that pressure. One in five primary schoolteachers now deals with special needs. These are all extra requirements, not only in our schools but also as a pressure on our building programme. My priority was to put the people in place in order to meet the children's needs and to allow the schools be as flexible as possible in providing the space. We will get around to providing the space requirements as well.

As far as applications for temporary accommodation were concerned, many of them pertained to special needs, but the Department was obliged to give priority to classrooms. Temporary accommodation was needed for developing schools where classes were needed. Hence, it was not possible to approve all the applications received. However, I am conscious of the fact that because of the extra resources put into special needs, the extra teachers appointed and the additional posts going into disadvantaged schools, more pressure will be put on space in many schools. For that reason, we must consider the school in the context of the school building and modernisation fund for next year.