School Accommodation
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-07
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Shane Moynihan (FF), Dublin Mid-West

I acknowledge this is not the Minister of State’s brief and I appreciate her taking the time to go through this.
I welcome the indication from the Department that it is aware of the need to extend planning permission. Without being flippant, the central point still holds here in that these parents and the school community were promised the school would go to construction during this two-year period. If we are talking about extending planning permission, there is a gap there in terms of the school building needing to be provided. It would be great to get an update from the Department about when it thinks it will have completed the due diligence on the next preferred tenderer and whether it thinks it will be able to move to construction imminently. If a minor extension on planning permission is needed, so be it, but the priority for these parents is the permanent school building. They have been waiting an awfully long time for it. The students are learning in prefabs. The site and money is there. Tá an toil ann. Parents want to see to see delivery on this building. I urge the Minister of State to bring this back to the Minister for education to make it very clear to her that the school deserves and needs a very clear update on when progress will happen in respect of construction. While it is important to place contingency, let us not make contingency the plan. It is important that we try to focus the mind and get to the plan we need to get to.
With regard to the staffing issues, the Minister of State set out the figures quite clearly. Scoil Chrónáin is a Gaelscoil providing a first-class education and, as I mentioned, Gaelscoileanna get flexibility in terms of their pupil-teacher ratio. There is probably a case for that in the case of Gaelscoileanna in non-Gaeltacht areas, though I am also very conscious that there are other schools in my constituency that have also lost teachers as a result of falling enrolment numbers. That is why it is even more important that we as a Government, and I as a Government backbencher, continue to support the calls to bring down the pupil-teacher ratio to 19:1, to ensure we reduce our class sizes to the levels they need to be, and continue to support our teachers. In an environment where there are more special educational needs and teachers are under pressure as a result, and where there is more expected of our teachers, that reduction of the pupil-teacher ratio is extremely important.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-07-07/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:07+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-07