When I reported progress last week, I was referring to a matter which is of some serious importance to the parents of children in urban areas, particularly in areas that have been expanding rapidly. I referred to the fact that over the years there appears to have been a lack of the necessary co-operation between the Minister for Education and those concerned with the provision of school buildings. We have repeatedly, in the perimeter areas of the city of Dublin, a situation where large residential estates have been completed and the families that moved into them had two, three or four children of school-attending age. They found when they moved in that there was no school in the immediate neighbourhood to which the children could be transferred. The problem may be a problem of planning as far as the Minister is concerned. It appears to me from the reply given to a Question which I had on the Order Paper that the problem is not only a problem of planning but a problem of education as far as the Minister and his Department are concerned.
The primary step one must take before one does anything is to convince oneself that what is required is necessary, is reasonable and should be possible. The Minister stated, in reply to my question on Tuesday, 29th November at column 1708 of the Official Report:
It will be appreciated, therefore, that while the Department begins to carry out its survey of the school accommodation requirements immediately firm proposals of house building are available it is understandable that there must be a time lag between the actual building of the houses and the schools since some delays must inevitably arise in the school managers' procuring sites and taking out title to them and for other reasons.
Thousands of Dublin families have, over the years, had the experience that because the Department were prepared to accept the situation, children have to travel two, three, four, five or six miles to school because there is no school in their immediate neighbourhood. The primary reason for that defect in our educational system is the failure of the Department to accept the principle that the education of our children is a little more important than making a mistake and building a school with two or three additional classrooms which may remain empty for a while.
Successive Ministers have blandly accepted a situation in which parents have been faced with the problem and the difficulty of finding some temporary school for their children, with all that that involves—taking them to the bus, getting them on the buses, sacrificing time to meet them at lunch hour, and sacrificing more time to meet them in the evening. That situation arises despite the fact that in nearly every case the Department would have had quite accurate forecasting of the eventual need in the area. The Department have indulged in the extraordinary exercise of counting the heads of the children in the area before taking steps to ensure adequate classroom accommodation is made available. When I say "adequate", I should qualify it with the word "barely". The result has been a situation in which children have not attended school for prolonged periods and that at a time when a break in their education can have a very serious effect on that education. Even at this very moment the Minister talks about the difficulty in acquiring sites and the time lag between the actual building of the houses and the construction of the school. Might I refer the Minister to one project, which was the darling of one of his colleagues?