PRIMARY students at O'Connell's CBS on the North Circular Road, Dublin, were unable to return to school after the Easter holidays yesterday morning because of damage done to the school in an arson attack.
Two rooms were destroyed and a large number of windows broken during a break in at the school at around 6.30 a.m. The intruders tore off a wire mesh on a first floor window to gain entry, then used an inflammable substance to start fires in the art room and one of the classrooms.
"They came well prepared," said the school's vice principal, Mr Tom Foley. "They must have had a ladder to get up to the window, and they had a Jemmy. The gardai found a jemmy."
No ladder was found. The artroom, which was completely destroyed by fire, was used to store jerseys and sports equipment. The second fire was in a classroom at the far end of the school from the art room. The front of the classroom was badly burned. The ceilings in both rooms will have to be replaced.
"It's a very solid structure built in the 1950s and the fire wouldn't spread," Mr Foley said.
When the intruders went down to the ground floor, to smash the glass in classroom doors and on school photographs of classes going back to 1954, detectors set off the alarm.
No one was caught by the gardai and it is not known who started the fire. Yesterday the smell of smoke pervaded the building, and there was an inch or more of water covering the art room floor and stretching down the corridor.
Among the photographs on the ground floor corridor are portraits of Sean T. O Ceallaigh, Sean Lemass, John A. Costello and Arthur Griffith, all former pupils of O'Connells.
The cost of the damage has not yet been calculated. Mr Foley said he hoped the approximately 270 students would be back at school next week.
"Everyone was shocked at the amount of wanton damage. Whoever did this came with a jemmy and with the stuff to start the fire. It was very deliberate.
"I have a feeling of disappointment that all the work that the teachers had produced has been destroyed and the equipment that they use. The children need the education and they are missing it now."
The secondary school was not affected by the fire.
