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

Eoin Hayes (SD), Dublin Bay South

In the next supplementary reply, I ask for some clarity on contracts and the Department's involvement in contracting with the schools. I note that 400 school meals were evaluated and a third of them did not meet the basic nutritional standards. Somebody told me that they did not meet three of the five guidelines. Will the Minister give a sense of how many met all five of the guidelines that were assessed? He mentioned there were 16 guidelines overall. What is the plan to assess those future guidelines? There are 11 more guidelines to go. Is it possible that nobody is meeting all the standards that the Department has set? How will that be evaluated by the dietitian and by the Department?

---

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