Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

With a view to improving its own planning procedures, my Department's school planning and building unit has been recently re-organised with the establishment of a forward planning section and a developing areas unit. A number of new staff were employed by the Department to work in these areas and there has been a significant redistribution of existing staff within the building unit. That might give rise to some of the lack of information that was given to Senators. I certainly accept that some of the answers that were given to Senator O'Toole, in particular about raising a matter on the Adjournment, were inappropriate and should not have been said to a Senator. It may be the case that staff were not able to give the information because we have made so many changes within the building unit and moved people around because of all the extra staff. I will ensure that as soon as staff settle down in their new areas of responsibility, they will be able to give whatever information is available. When dealing with all of this, what most schools want to know is whether the project is going ahead and if it is going ahead now. As Senators are aware, all of the information as to what is moving was publicly available earlier this year. I announced 38 school projects that were going to construction almost immediately. Again, people will see that they followed precisely the main banding criteria. Special schools were included because they were special schools. Schools were included that were in developing areas. We announced almost 30 new drop-in schools for developing areas which will be prioritised this year. There are schools that have been on the list for a long time. No school jumped a band, prioritisation or rating. Anybody can look at the list and see that this is the case.