School Meals Programme
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-26
============================================================

Dara Calleary (FF), Mayo

The dietician has been working since September and she has completed an in-depth review of school meal supplier menus and their compliance with nutritional standards. The nutritional standards have been in place since 2019, since the inception of the programme. They were developed by the Irish Nutrition and Dietetic Institute, the HSE, Safefood and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland. There are 16 standards in total - 13 relating to food and three relating to drinks. The interim report is based effectively on desktop, so we are now beginning, with colleagues from the Department of Social Protection, the process of getting into schools and looking at what is being delivered. The main findings of that interim report, which were based predominantly on looking at menus, is that at least 66% met at least three of the five standards looked at in the initial look. Some 80% contained adequate carbohydrates that did not include foods high in fat, salt and sugar. One of the issues is around fruit and vegetables and how available they are. That was very hard to decipher from the menu. We will have the full report by the summer and I look forward to discussing it.
In regard to our role as a Department, we are also developing an inspection tool. We are getting into schools. We did 400 school inspections last year and another 100 desktop inspections.

---

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/2026-02-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:42+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-26