Work on several hundred schools, including some in a very dilapidated condition, has been frozen because of Government spending cuts.
This was confirmed yesterday as the Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, published the long-promised list detailing the school-building programme for this year.
After securing an extra €20 million from the third-level building fund, the Minister announced that 149 large-scale building projects would be funded this year. A further 430 schools would benefit by way of grants towards smaller projects.
Mr Dempsey acknowledged that some schools will be disappointed by their relatively low place on the list. These include schools which are continuing to endure sub-standard accommodation and some which are on the INTO "black-list" of sub-standard schools.
Asked about this, the Minister said that he would naturally like to have much more substantial funds at his disposal but this was not possible at this time. "There is no point in codding people," he said.
The list of primary schools that will not receive funding in the current year is very similar to a list of almost 400 schools which was published in The Irish Times in December.
The Minister stressed, however, that he was "not freezing anything" at this stage. Schools would move up from planning to tender to construction. But he could not say precisely when this would be.
In a radical and widely-praised new departure, the Minister also published the criteria used by the Department in deciding which particlar projects should proceed. There was he said, a perception that schools could "jump the queue" by lobbying. politicians, parish priests or trade unions. This would now stop, he said. Everyone would know precisely where they stood.
Broadly, those schools which are at a pre-construction stage are certain to be built in the short term. But those which were still on the drawing board and at architectural planning will have to wait.
The Minister could not say exactly when these schools would be built, as this would depend on prevailing budget circumstances.
The issue should be clarified further when Mr Dempsey and the Minister for Finance, Mr Mc Creevy, work out a five-year rolling school modernisation programme later this year.
The initiative has drawn a frosty response from the INTO. Its general secretary, Mr John Carr, said thousands of pupils, parents and teachers, working in sub-standard accommodation, would draw little comfort from the new list.
"In many schools the full curriculum cannot be delivered. Classrooms are too small, there is no PE hall and resources cannot be kept in school because there is nowhere to store them".
Mr Carr said that while some schools at the planning stage might move to tender ... there will be very few, if any, new major pr ojects in construction in 2003".
The INTO is now pressing for much greater capital funding to deal with the school accommodation crisis.
The budget for the school building programme amounts to €343 million this year from a total Department of Education budget of over €5 billion. Most of the budget goes on teachers pay and pensions. The Labour Party Spokesperson on Education, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan has described the new list as a "betrayal of pupils and teachers all over the country who were grossly misled by local Fianna Fáil and PD candidates before the general election".
She said pupils and teachers in hundreds of dank, dilapidated and rat-infested schools were being asked to wait for another year at least before renovation on their school would be commenced.
The full list of schools and details of where they stand in the building programme is available on the Department of Education website.
http://www.irlgov.ie/educ