Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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178. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the status of the building of a permanent school building for a school (details supplied); the reason for the ongoing delays; the steps his Department is taking to overcome these issues; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [48043/17]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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The school to which the Deputy refers is currently located on the Notre Dame campus, Upper Churchtown Road, Dublin 14 pending completion of the permanent accommodation for the school at the St. Tiernan’s Community School site in Balally. 

As the Deputy may be aware, outline planning permission at a site in Balally for the school to which the Deputy refers was submitted to the relevant local authority in December 2012 but was refused on the grounds of site access.  This was appealed by my Department to An Bord Pleanála but subsequently withdrawn to facilitate submission to the local authority of an amended outline planning permission in 2013, which was also refused on similar grounds.

This decision was appealed by my Department to An Bord Pleanála but was refused.  However, the Board considered that the matter of assessing alternative means of accessing these lands would benefit from a co-ordinated approach by my Department and the local authority in the interests of achieving a comprehensive and balanced solution to ongoing access issues on this educational campus.

In relation to progress on the permanent school accommodation, as has been stated previously, access to the permanent site is complex planning issue. Since June 2017, my Department has met with a third-party landowner on a number of occasions with a view to negotiating an acceptable solution to the access issue. As these are commercially sensitive negotiations it is not possible to comment further at this stage. All aspects are being progressed in close liaison with the local authority in order to ensure that a further planning application has the best likelihood of success. My Department is fully committed to bringing this project to a satisfactory conclusion as soon as the planning issues have been resolved.