Fiona O'Loughlin (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is having a busy morning here with us. I thank him for taking the time to come here today for what is an important matter for many parents of children with additional needs in my area of south Kildare.

I want to speak to the Minister of State today about St. Anne's special school on the Curragh in County Kildare. The school was established in 1967 by the visionary Elizabeth Birmingham and her husband, Michael, and it moved to its present location on the edge of the Curragh in 1974. It is a co-educational school for pupils between the ages of four and 18 who have been assessed as having either a moderate or severe-profound general learning disability. It is a great school community that provides top-class supports to the students in their school. I know many of the teachers and the staff members there who do a really good job.We all know how adequate and timely intervention supports can be and are for children with additional needs, and St. Anne's does a really good job in terms of supporting its students and families.

However, the school has totally and long outgrown its current building and is desperately in need of a new school building. The current building is no longer fit for purpose both in terms of size and ongoing maintenance. Due to the ages of sections of the older building, which, as I said, was constructed in the 1970s, it is in need of constant ongoing repairs.

The school has gone through four rounds of emergency funding from the Department just to keep the basics of the school up to standard. A new wing to the current building was completed in 2012 at which point plans were initiated for a further building development on the site to accommodate the growing need of the community. The school currently houses 13 classrooms and plans were drawn up ten years ago in May 2014 for an additional capital build on site to increase the capacity to 16 classrooms. As of today, the project is still at stage 2B - detailed design.

Therefore, as the Minister of State will acknowledge, we are a decade on from the designs the principal has in her office being drawn. It is totally unacceptable that we have vulnerable children in desperate need of support and countless stressed parents in my area of south Kildare who are at their wits' end trying to secure a special school place for their child. We have here a project stalled for almost ten years that would deliver three additional classes. If this project were to be delivered, it would cater to 18 additional students, which is more than two thirds of St. Anne's waiting list. St. Anne's has always been oversubscribed and the condition of the building is now also putting the school under significant financial pressure.

I welcome the announcement of new special schools, including one in the south Kildare area albeit it is in north Kildare. We need to be planning for the future. We need to have these schools. We need to be confident that we can tackle the current demand. It does not make sense that the Department can announce a totally new school to tackle the lack of capacity, while, at the same time, leave a development project for an existing school project on the long finger for ten years. I understand that tender documents are being prepared. We want to know when St. Anne's will simply move on to the next phase of this process. We want to know when the builders can be on site to deliver this. We need to see more urgency from the Department.