Tá fáilte roimh an Aire don Teach seo ar Lá na Gaeilge. Tá ceist faoi cúpla scoileanna á cur os a chomhair agus tá súil agam go mbeidh an freagra go han mhaith.
Adjournment Matter. - Carlow-Kilkenny Schools.
Tá freagra ach b'fhéidir nach mbeidh sé an-mhaith.
I welcome the Minister to the House to answer the matters which I want to raise on the Adjournment. First, I will deal with the various schools briefly as I want to detain the House as long as needs be only.
Clonegal national school is situated in County Carlow. It was built in the fifties as a result of an amalgamation of the schools at Parkbridge and Clonegal in Carlow. Parkbridge national school was closed in the late sixties. Therefore, we have a three teacher school in Clonegal at the moment with one pre-fab which is 15 years old occupied by one teacher and a teacher in a parochial hall in that area. Approximately 170 pupils are expected to be educated in the best way the teachers can, but unfortunately the conditions there, as in other schools, leave a lot to be desired. The parents and board of management of this area have facilitated amalgamation over the years. In the late 1960s they facilitated the amalgamation of Parkbridge and Clonegal in order to bring about the necessary co-operation between both ends of the parish, as it were. No provision was made for this amalgamation except the provision of a pre-fab. An extension has been required for a good while. They need three extra classrooms because of the increase in the number of pupils in that area and there are plans for a physical education hall and a staff room. I hope the Minister will be in a position to place this project for tender as soon as possible.
The second school to which I would refer is Ballyhale Vocational School in County Kilkenny. Ballyhale Vocational School was opened in 1959 for 42 students and they had their first Intermediate Certificate examination there in 1969. About eight or ten years ago they developed their school to such an extent that they were able to offer Leaving Certificate Examination to the students. Enrolment at the school has increased to 220 students and I would be very much afraid that some of the students who are at present at Ballyhale would start to drift to other schools if there were a rumour of closure of the school or if the Department of Education were not in a position to give a commitment that they were serious about building a new school for Ballyhale. There are 15 teachers there, if you include the principal and vice-principal, and they give a full range of subjects in a very exemplary way. A new school was sanctioned in 1981 for Ballyhale and presently it is at stage four. Recent negotiations were entered into by the board of management at the vocational school at Ballyhale and by Kilkenny VEC for the purchase of an additional site in order to accommodate the new school. They ran into some difficulties in relation to planning permission et cetera because of its location on a very bad road bend. I understand that a deputation met the Minister and the Minister of State and officials from the Department some time ago in relation to the sanctioning of this particular site and agreement, as I said, has already been entered into and I would hope that the Minister would be in a position to give Government commitment and Department commitment to buying this site. It will indicate to the parents, to the pupils and to the board of management that the Government are serious about building a new school at Ballyhale and dispel any rumours that might be surfacing at the moment.
The Minister will agree that the condition of Ballyhale Vocational School is probably one of the worst in the country. They have 11 pre-fabs and most of them go back to 1965. They have only, in effect, two classrooms, one for woodwork and one for domestic economy. The Ballyhale people have been very patient and the teachers and pupils have been extremely patient in waiting for this new school to be built.
I must also refer to the fact that there is a hairdressing course being conducted in Ballyhale and in order to establish the proper facilities for that course they had to convert existing shower units into a classroom facility. In this day and age it should not be necessary to convert shower units into a classroom for the purpose of carrying out any school course.
In Ballyhale they have had tremendous trauma over the last few weeks in that a number of their teachers have been redeployed. Where redeployment has to take place it should take place at the beginning of a school year rather than in the middle of a school year. Students are upset by the fact that a teacher has to be redeployed in the middle of the year and courses like applied mathematics, which were being offered in this school, are now curtailed because of the redeployment of a teacher who has to spend so many days in Ballyhale and other days in nearby Graiguenamanagh Vocational School. The Minister would need to examine the financing of the vocational education system in the context of Ballyhale Vocational School. I look forward to hearing from the Minister in relation to the site at least.
Mooncoin Vocational School in south Kilkenny is the other school I want to refer to. This school was built in the early 'forties and it also has a large number of prefabricated buildings very much in need of replacement. Mooncoin is a very large catchment area and many residents of that area are commuting daily to Waterford. It is a growing area and one that is likely to continue to grow. There are in the region of 300 pupils there at the moment and the number is increasing yearly. It is not surprising it is increasing because of its very close proximity to the city of Waterford. I again appeal to the Minister to consider that if the pupils and their parents consider that a new school at Mooncoin will not be established shortly, they will look around their immediate area for better facilities and a better standard of education. There are 16 teachers there at the moment and there is no excuse for the Minister in relation to this school because 1987 was the year in which Mooncoin Vocational School was to commence. The various stages have all been gone through and all that is needed is something that is very scarce in the Minister's Department at the moment, that is, finance. I know she has had some difficulties in recent days with finance and I hope she will not have the same difficulty in providing the structural facilities that are needed.
Educational facilities like these are very important to places like Mooncoin. The development of different schools in County Kilkenny was forecast some years ago by Department of Education officials and there is an established need for a school here. I appeal to the Minister, with the limited resources she has in her Department, to consider giving some indication to the board of management of Mooncoin Vocational School of a commencement date for the construction of this school.
I want to thank Senator Hogan for the very excellent way in which he defends his home county. I am sure Kilkenny is very proud of him and the fact that he has a forum here in the Seanad to bring up the various cases for his area is as important to him as it is to the community. Indeed I used my own Seanad time very much in the same fashion. I will go through the three schools in the order in which the Senator spoke of them and the first was Clonegal Primary School.
There is no point in my going back over the historical data because, of course, the Senator has given the facts very well including the fact that it has a staffing level of five teachers and it dates back to 1953. The Office of Public Works produced a plan for the extension following its usual feasibility study but, as the Senator said, revised plans had to be prepared when it was found that the average enrolments were going up and that a five classroomed school would be required. This produced another difficulty in that an extension of the site then became necessary. The Department and the Office of Public Works went about that and all documentation was completed in March, 1987. There is good news at the end, so do not get too despondent about this school. The further news in relation to the Clonegal scheme and indeed other ones is the lack of finance to which the Senator has referred. The positive thing is that recently the chairman of the school's board of management — the Senator possibly knows this — came to see officers of my Department's primary building branch and it was agreed that the possibility of the Department grant-aiding a modest extension to replace the pre-fab and the parochial hall would be investigated. What would be in question here is a basic type of structure which, if the price was right, could be offered to the school for the moment to make it do with what they have while waiting in line with the other schools which need tackling. More and more people are finding, in difficult economic circumstances, that they can be inventive in how they go about what they need. I am hopeful about the discussions at present going on with the chairman of the board of management who took the initiative himself to come to the Department. I cannot give any more details about it because it has not reached that stage.
Is that a Lisdowney-type formula?
No. I know about Lisdowney of course but it is apparently an idea which has found interest with the chairman and the board of management and they are at present discussing it with the Department on that basis. I hope their discussions will be fruitful and indeed I would think that the Clonegal people, as I am sure all Kilkenny people, are very reasonable and have decided that they may have a solution to offer to the Department which we would gladly embrace as well. I am interested in those discussions and I am going to follow them up with my Department officials because I think there may be scope for further developments on those lines.
The Senator spoke next about Ballyhale, and gave the historical situation at Ballyhale. He said it had 220 pupils; 219 is what my brief tells me so we will not quibble about one pupil. The Department are very aware that the present accommodation at Ballyhale Vocational School cannot be regarded as fully satisfactory comprising, as it does, the temporary prefabricated accommodation with a small amount of good permanent accommodation. It is intended in the overall plan to retain that small amount and to work around it. The acquisition of the additional property has caused great difficulty for some time.
The acquisition of additional property adjacent to the school has been found necessary as the local planning authority indicated that no new buildings would be allowed in front of the existing permanent school. That is because of the road frontage. The problem of securing the additional land has not yet been finalised and I believe all efforts are being made to do that. In that context, even if it were finalised, the money would not be there right now to proceed with it but that will not stop them going ahead with their investigations into the further ways in which they could obtain this land. The previous Government decided to carry out a major review of all projects at post-primary level at various levels of planning and to see the need for them as they arose. That review is still going on. That was the previous Government's decision and we carried it through. That review is still going on and we hope to have it completed shortly, perhaps by Christmas or January. I know Ballyhale has a very good record of a range of subjects. The Senator spoke about the trauma of redeployment. I think it has a shared teacher with other vocational schools. I heard of the case in another context. I am of the opinion that the teacher hours are working out fairly satisfactorily but I take the point that it is difficult for students in the middle of a school year to alter their schedule. If there is any particular difficulty the Senator has in mind about that I would be glad to hear from him.
With regard to Mooncoin Vocational School, again he talks about its extensive needs and the curriculum which it offers for the area and I am sure that is so. The Department have approved in principle of a proposal to develop the vocational school so as to bring its pupil capacity to 275 places in permanent accommodation. Then there is the architectural planning of the project; the estimated cost is £1.3 million and the project has reached the bills of quantity stage. This project is one of the large number of second level school building projects where architectural planning has been completed. The next step in the normal way for such projects would be to sanction the seeking of tenders.
Because of the difficult financial situation which we have and because of the fact that the capital financial allocation for post-primary building for 1988 is extremely limited, most of which will be taken up by the contractual arrangements already entered into in 1987 and requiring further funding in 1988, it will not be possible to proceed to tender with this project at this time. However, we are preparing in the Department a list of what we would consider would be priority areas when we would receive our funding in the middle of 1988 which would be for the following year. I will certainly undertake in the light of that to keep those two post-primary schools in County Kilkenny under review at that point.
There is just one question in relation to Ballyhale. The Minister stated that the question of the additional property that is needed to build a new school is not finalised. Two acres were purchased at a price of £12,000.
Another two acres?
Two acres was the amount required by the Department. That has been agreed.
I regret my carrier pigeon did not come with that information.
The Department have to sanction this purchase. It has been agreed with the officials and it has been agreed with the principal of the school who is actually the vendor of the property so there is a vested interest there on the part of the principal to ensure that the Minister agrees to this matter as soon as possible. Hopefully, she will not let the principal down. If the Department could sanction the agreement of this price for the property it would indicate the commitment of the Department to proceed with the school project as soon as possible.
I take the Senator's point. I would not be able to give you that commitment because my brief does not contain that information. The Senator obviously has more up-to-date local knowledge of Ballyhale than I have but I will have that matter investigated and I will communicate with him.
The Seanad adjourned at 8.45 p.m. until 2.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 2 December 1987.