Joe McHugh (Donegal, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I absolutely take the important issues the Senator has raised very seriously. We have to plan for the future. The context for planning does not relate only to schools but to housing. Where there will be more housing, there will be additional pressures. As part of the ongoing conversation regarding where people are going to live and go to school and how they will travel to school, I take the Senator's point. Fingal is a big geographical area and there are more than 8,000 places in post-primary schools there alone, which gives one a glimpse of the population dynamic that exists.

I also accept what the Senator stated in the context of ensuring that this matter is kept on the radar. A number of her colleagues have also raised this issue with me. In my short time in this new post I have seen that the pressure on high-population areas to ensure that they have quality educational centres is very important to the politicians who represent those areas. However, I want to work in tandem with the different frameworks that we have including the capital plan for the period 2016 to 2021. Obviously, we also have the ten-year capital plan. The latter provides more than €8.4 billion for education, which is double the money provided in the previous ten years. All of that funding will be needed. Pressure is coming on the sector. When it comes to land acquisition, as prices rise we have to ensure that we get in there as competitively as possible, although when a need is identified and increases in population are projected, I will certainly pay very close attention.