The official opening of the new €60 million Cork School of Music yesterday was hailed by Minister for Education Mary Hanafin as a tremendous facility that will ensure music will remain at the heart of the cultural centre of the city, writes Barry Roche, Southern Correspondent in Cork
The new school will accommodate 120 full-time students and 3,500 part-time students, and provide facilities including a 400-seat auditorium, 120-seat theatre, almost 50 classrooms, specialist spaces such as piano, audio and IT laboratories, and a library.
"For close on 130 years, the Cork School of Music has nurtured, developed and created music, speech and drama at this site .... Now with these impressive new facilities, I am sure the Cork School of Music will achieve even greater things in the future," she said.
The school is a constituent college of Cork Institute of Technology and CIT president Dr Brendan Murphy said there was a great sense of excitement among the staff and students at the potential it offers for learning music, including traditional music, in Cork.
"We want to push out the boat on Irish traditional music - there's a great tradition of that here and we want to look at the possibility of attracting a lot of European students who want to do a semester in traditional music and they should be able to do it here," he said.
Director Dr Geoffrey Spratt said that the new school offered great potential for the 120-strong staff and the student body which would grow to 400 full-time students with the additional facilities available in the five-story building.
"It's an enormous scale of operation but this building is fit for the purpose and fit for the 21st century," said Dr Spratt.
He added that staff had returned to work on September 3rd and spent the first week training on the new technology before students returned.
Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Micheál Martin, who first announced the project in 1999 when he was minister for education, said it was "a splendid building" and reflected well on the PPP model in terms of obtaining high specification.