Special Educational Needs Dail Éireann — 2026-02-19 ============================================================ Michael Moynihan (FF), Cork North-West The four issues brought to my attention prior to coming to the House concern St. Mochta’s, Monksland and Shelagh national schools and car parking issues at the new build for Ardee Educate Together primary school. The Deputy raised other issues that I might come back to in my closing remarks. I thank the Deputy for raising this matter. The Department of education has invested a serious amount of money in the sectoral investment plan for the period 2026 to 2030, which involves a strong emphasis on maximising existing capacity and prioritisation of school building projects to meet the most urgent needs. From the total of €7.55 billion being invested via this plan, it is envisaged that approximately €5 billion will be used for project roll-out to support the delivery and modernisation of school buildings across the large-scale, additional accommodation, modular and annual September accommodation needs programmes. Over the course of this year and next, there will be construction work on some 10% of the school estate. These projects will, when completed, provide 57,000 additional and modernised school places. with a strong special educational needs focus in all projects. The first school referred to is a co-educational Catholic primary school under the patronage of the Archbishop of Armagh. It has an enrolment in the current academic year of 182 pupils, including two special education classes. The school submitted an application under the additional school accommodation scheme in 2025. The application is under assessment, and officials are in ongoing contact with this school. The second school is a co-educational Catholic school under the patronage of the Archbishop of Armagh. It has an enrolment this year of 139 pupils, including two special classes. The school applied for additional accommodation in 2022, and on foot of that application had modular accommodation comprising two special education classrooms and one special education tuition room delivered in May 2023. The third school is a co-educational primary school under the patronage of the Archbishop of Armagh. It has an enrolment of 82, including pupils in its special education class, which was established at this school in September 2024. In October 2025, the school submitted an application for additional accommodation for two mainstream classrooms, and the application is currently being assessed by officials in the Department. I can confirm that the fourth school has a major project for a new school building that was devolved for delivery to Louth County Council. It is currently at stage 4, construction, of the architectural design process. The Department is engaging with the local authority regarding a proposal on the provision of additional car parking spaces. Louth County Council has been and will continue to engage with the school authorities regarding this project. At a national level, primary enrolments are projected to decline by almost 100,000 over a ten-year period. Given the general downward direction of overall enrolments in the area, the Department's focus for the assessment of such additional accommodation applications will be to analyse the extent to which enrolments at the school and neighbouring schools are serving the local area in the first instance. We are looking carefully at all applications to ensure we maximise what we have in terms of additional accommodation for the four schools raised by the Deputy. Some of the schools are at the very start of the application process. I assure him that the Department is working through the applications and will be in contact with the school authorities shortly with further information. --- 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/dail/2026-02-19/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:40+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-19