Jerry Buttimer (Fine Gael)

The motion is about providing answers to school principals, staff, parents and pupils. If the Minister of State at the Department of Education and Science, Deputy Haughey, does nothing else tonight but relays that simple message to the Minister, we will have got somewhere. If Senator Boyle can use his influence in Government, which he professes to have, then he will have done a great day's work.

There are schools in my constituency of Cork South-Central to which Deputy Micheál Martin, the former Minister for Education and Science, made a plethora of promises. I will not name those promises but we all know what they are. There is no transparency, accountability or openness in the Department regarding the school building programme.

I telephoned the Department recently to inquire about the Star of the Sea school in Passage West. I was told that the principal officer who had been dealing with the matter had moved to another section. The person to whom I spoke claimed to have only taken over responsibility and suggested I call again in four weeks' time. I rang again and was told that the person responsible had changed jobs again. It is not good enough.

Why are Members of this House constantly tabling matters on the Adjournment and why are our colleagues in the other House tabling endless numbers of parliamentary questions about the schools building programme? It is because of sheer frustration. If Members on the Government side put themselves in the position of a school principal, the chairman of a board of management, a teacher in a sub-standard school or a pupil who is being educated in a school with no running water or with sub-standard toilet facilities, they would not be happy either. They should not tell us that everything is great. We know there has been substantial investment in schools. The former Deputy, Ray MacSharry, coined the phrase "boom and bloom", but boom and bloom has been replaced by absolute chaos in the schools building programme.

The people are despondent and angry and are waiting in the long grass. The teachers of Ireland are sick of it. This is not a matter of the INTO playing politics. It is about absolute, genuine frustration. I say that as a former schoolteacher who meets colleagues daily. Let us have a debate about transparency and openness.

The bands are fine but schools do not know where they go when they get to band 3, 2 or 1. How do they get onto step one of the categorisation? When will they be told they can move from the design to the build phase? The people in Passage West watched while a school up the road from them was fast-tracked by Ministers playing politics. That is not good enough. We are talking about the children of Ireland and our education system. If we are serious about being a knowledge-based economy, the Government must be honest and transparent with the people, which is not happening at present. Senator Boyle knows that quite well and would agree with me.

It is about time we woke up to the reality. Let us get rid of the scripts. We have Adjournment debates in the House and they are a joke and a farce. My six-year old niece could write the replies. We get flowery rhetoric.