School Accommodation
Seanad Éireann — 2025-12-09
============================================================

Frankie Feighan (FG), Sligo-Leitrim

I thank Senator Comyn for raising this matter as it provides me with an opportunity, on behalf of the Minister for Education and Youth, to outline to the Seanad the current position in relation to the major building project for Marymount National School in Drogheda, County Louth. The project is included in the Department of Education and Youth’s construction programme, which will be delivered under the national development plan as part of the Project Ireland 2024 framework. The brief for this project is the development of a new 24-mainstream-class primary school, plus four classrooms for pupils with special educational needs, along with one home school liaison room on the existing site.
Stage 1 for Marymount National School was approved in February 2013, as the Senator said. Stage 2A was approved in September 2015 following the submission of an addendum report. Due to an unresolvable dispute with regard to design team fees, the regional design team was replaced in November 2016 and works began on stage 2B of the building project. As the Senator said, there are decades of issues here. In mid-2017, the board of management advised the Department that it could acquire additional land from Louth County Council for the school building project. The original site was extremely restrictive, and the acquisition of this land eliminated the need for a phased delivery of the project. The sale closed in July 2018. The planning application was submitted in June 2021, and was initially granted after a request for further information.
However, an appeal was lodged to An Coimisiún Pleanála in January 2022 which delayed the granting of planning permission until April 2022. Following this, the stage 2 report was approved in September 2024 and the project moved to the current stage. This major building project is currently at stage 3, tender action evaluation and award, and the Department is currently reviewing tender report number 2, which is subject to due diligence by the Department. This is a critical part of the overall completion of the stage 3 process and vital for ensuring quality and value for money.
In July the Government announced a capital allocation of €7.5 billion for the Department of Education and Youth for the period 2026 to 2030 under the national development plan. As part of the NDP allocation, the Department will place a strong emphasis on provision for children with special educational needs, with a particular focus on meeting annual school place needs. In relation to the project roll-out for large-scale projects and additional school accommodation scheme projects, the approach will be to continue to maximise the capacity of the existing school estate as much as possible in the first instance and to provide necessary additional capacity through targeted and prioritised project roll-out over the 2026 to 2030 period to meet the most urgent and prioritised needs

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-12-09/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:26+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-09