I am grateful to the Leas-Cheann Comhairle for affording me the opportunity to raise on the Adjournment the crisis in school places in Castleknock community college. I call on the Minister for Education and Science, Deputy Noel Dempsey, to stop hiding and agree to meet with the parents of students at Castleknock Community College. I also ask the Minister of State, Deputy Brian Lenihan, who is a Deputy for the area, to meet with the parents to discuss the crisis that has developed at the school regarding a shortage of places.
Some 50 children are now on a waiting list for places for September 2004 due to their not being successful in the recent lottery for places at the school. Castleknock Community College recently held its annual lottery for school places for children now in fifth class who expect to attend secondary school in September 2004. As Minister of State, I was involved in the successful development and building of this popular school that has always had a high demand for places. Due to the exceptional amount of house building and development in the school catchment area, student numbers have steadily risen and now stand at over 1,110. While the management, principal and teachers of the school are anxious to facilitate the students, they cannot do so unless they have the facilities to accommodate them.
In 1998, Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats promised the school a purpose-built gym and other facilities to cope with the large number of pupils. However, although the facilities were promised and had gone to planning and various other steps in the Department's procedures for permitting building works, nothing has happened. In the context of the Government cutbacks in education, the school is now left in the no man's land of the waiting list of works to be completed. It is on the secondary list. It might hear from the Department next year but it might not, we do not know.
Enormous distress has been caused to children and parents who had been reassured as recently as during last year's general election campaign that there was no need to worry. They now find themselves with few options as to where to attend secondary school. Children are being separated from their friends and classmates and face the prospect of attending schools far from their homes, if they can get a place. Dublin 15 has been targeted for enormous levels of house building, yet the Fianna Fáil-PD Government, and its developer-builder friends, supporters and donors refuse to accept that building thousands of new homes requires a complementary investment in school places at both primary and secondary level.
The Government can clearly address the current situation by giving the go-ahead for the additional facilities promised. In the interim, it could provide temporary accommodation to meet the immediate shortfall in resources and places. We do not want to hear any old guff or witness the extreme cynicism in the context of next year's local and European elections where the Minister and the Minister of State will get another letter, co-signed by the Taoiseach and various other luminaries in Fianna Fáil to suggest the school will get a prefab. The parents and the children deserve to put out of their distress now.
