Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Madigan, for her time. This is a departmental matter and as both the Minister of State and the senior Minister, Deputy Foley, are new in their roles, I will not put the entire responsibility for this on them but work needs to be done in the Department of Education if we are serious about getting our buildings right for the children who spend 183 days of the year in them. Can the Minister of State confirm how many new buildings have completed design stage with the planning and building unit of the Department? In a post-Covid-19 greener future, can she confirm that all these new buildings have been designed with whole-school ventilation, fossil-fuel-free heating systems, sufficient outdoor multi-use games areas and safe active travel infrastructure?

I will deal with each of these four areas briefly. First, we know that these types of viruses are not going to go completely away and I received a response from the Department, which is currently putting new gas boilers into new buildings. That is not good enough in this day and age. At the same time, the Department is also retrofitting gas and oil burners into schools. It seems to be insane to be wasting money on new gas boilers in new schools when we are replacing them in other schools. Gas is a fossil fuel and there are plenty of other options now and the Department itself has been doing research on this for more than 20 years.

Second, on ventilation, many new schools do not have proper ventilation. I have seen a few new school designs for big secondary and primary schools. They have ventilation in the toilets and perhaps in the home economics room but do not have a whole-school ventilation system. The best practice now is closed envelope, air to water or air to air with a heat recovery ventilation system. That is what we want and need. We see that schools currently are not fit for purpose. The heating is on and the windows are open. Those days are over, as this is 2021. This is important because although we tell children that the climate has changed and that we must do everything that we can, we are not putting them in buildings in 2021 that are designed in a modern way, despite 20 years of research from the Department on getting it right.

The third issue I raise is sufficient outdoor space for play. I spent 14 years visiting schools and all too often I saw the lack of outdoor space. I see now these new multi-use game areas which are good for basketball and certain games. In many new schools, however, we do not have new pitches that will be big enough to host any camogie, football or hurling matches. I refer to one in my home town of Ennistymon in particular, where three schools are being amalgamated into a beautiful new school. It will have no pitch big enough to host camogie, football or hurling matches, which seems mad in this day and age because there are many sports for which grass is needed. I am not talking about small AstroTurf or basketball courts but about a proper pitch for the school and the children to be out on and having this space. It is all about the outdoors now and we want our children and teenagers to have access to that kind of infrastructure in all new buildings.

The final item I wish to raise concerns safe travel to schools to access the schools. The Department has been working with An Taisce's Green-Schools: Safe Routes to School, which is a new programme that has come through the Minister for Transport, which is great, but that involves retrofitting and redesigning existing schools. I am talking about new school buildings that do not have the proper infrastructure for active travel.They see it as a secondary thing. I have seen new designs which have winding roads leading to the school and parallel there is a winding cycling and walking route when we all know well a much shorter route could be put in at much less cost to encourage pedestrians and cyclists. I spent 14 years working full time on behavioural change and traffic jams outside every school in Ireland. We have to get the new builds right. We have to look at short, small infrastructure that encourages walkers and cyclists to see there is a quicker, safer route away from cars. We should not be running them parallel to cars, they cost more and are longer. It makes no sense. I would expect and demand better for our children as we move to a scary future with the new design in the Department.