(Mayo): I thank you, a Cheann Comhairle, for selecting this matter on the Adjournment. At midnight last night, I telephoned parents' representatives and board of management members of Aghamore national school, Ballyhaunis, County Mayo, to let them know that I intended to raise the appalling conditions at the school on the Adjournment this evening. The parents were still at the school. They had just ripped up some floorboards and discovered yet more dead rats. For weeks, the stench of dead rats has been unbearable. The moment one opens the school front door the smell is noticeable. As a result, the board of man agement had no option but to close the school this week.
Until now, the rats were located behind the skirting boards. Last night's excavations delivered rodent carcases from under the floor and the excavations continue today. It now appears that the school will have to close for at least another week. What an appalling indictment of the Government.
The school is 101 years old. It consists of three classrooms and a narrow hall. It has no indoor recreational area, very limited outdoor space for playing, no cloakroom, no staff room, no general purpose room and very limited toilet facilities. Shoes and coats are piled high in the narrow hallway. In this day and age, this is disgraceful. Last November I handed to the Minister for Education and Science, Deputy Woods, a well put-together dossier of photographs showing the cramped and spartan conditions and the holes bored by the rats through the timber floors and skirting boards. It contained a series of letters from a cross-section of the pupils in the various classes begging, pleading and imploring the Minister to approve a new school building, but the Minister turned a deaf ear. He did not have the courtesy to reply or to acknowledge even one of the letters. The children of Aghamore have been left to languish in such unhygienic conditions that they have been told by their teachers not to let their packed lunches touch the desks for fear of contracting the deadly Weil's disease which is spread by rats.
It is appalling that the Minister has not come into the House today because he has given clear assurances to the parents. On 8 February last the Minister visited Mayo and met a deputation from the school. He promised them that he would have the Department's planners out to inspect the school within two weeks. There are four suitable sites and there was to be a public private partnership. Yet nine weeks later the planners have not arrived. All the while the children of Aghamore have been suffering in accommodation that would not be tolerated in a Third World country. There is a seething anger in the Aghamore community. The people feel totally betrayed by the Minister. They see that £4 million is being squandered on a useless spire in the centre of Dublin and that £1 billion is being spent on a national stadium to satisfy the Taoiseach's ego. They see new schools in other areas replacing old schools not a fraction as dilapidated or unhygienic as their school. The irony is that this is a rural school whose pupil numbers are increasing and the projections are good. They are not prepared to wait and they should not be expected to wait. They want sanction for a new building and they want it now.
