Schools Building Projects
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-23
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Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (SF), Cork South-Central

If that is something the Minister of State could facilitate or help to facilitate, I will take him up on it. This is, of course, frustrating. The schools is looking for answers. When will the project go to stage 2? We can say the school delivery team has so many projects and it is hard to get through them all, but if the Government, at the highest level, is setting a target for the delivery of that many schools, it clearly needs to ensure the team is resourced enough to get through them. There are many other schools as well, as the Minister of State has alluded to, that are waiting for answers. That is not good enough. This is imposing a huge constraint on the ability of the school to operate.
It is under a lot of pressure. I have acknowledged, and I hope the Minister of State will also acknowledge, that it is never ideal for a school to be split across two sets of buildings. It is a difficult situation to manage.
When we talk about prioritisation, it should be taken into account that the school was given a commitment that its project would be prioritised. The context was that five years ago the school was told the building that had been clearly identified for the new school would no longer be available to it. The roadmap changed. The goalposts were shifted right at the last minute. The school was due to move into that building in September 2021. That option was removed and it now looks like it will be September 2027 at the earliest before the school moves.
The Minister of State will not be able to provide a date right now. However, I urge the Department to provide a date - even an approximate one - by which the school will get stage 2 approval, so that it can understand when the project will move on.
I make the point again that the school will not be able to deliver the number of autism classes it wants to deliver. The school leadership has the appetite and desire to deliver as many autism class places as possible. It will not be able to do that until such time as the school has the permanent school building, its permanent home, for the coming decades and generations.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-23/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-23