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TD slams school prefab costs


THE Department of Education and Science has robustly defended its record on school prefabs in Galway after an Opposition TD in the county claimed the €1.8 million annual spend is “wasteful squandering of scarce financial resources”.
Fine Gael TD Ulick Burke stated that the annual expenditure by the Department of Education and Science of €1.84m per year on 154 pre-fabricated buildings at primary schools in Galway “must be seen as a wasteful squandering of scarce financial resources.”
A number of South Galway schools currently have prefabs on site. Ballinderreen National School has two prefabs at an annual cost of €23,882, Kilbeacanty National School has one costing €11,370 per year while Kilchreest National School and Kilnadeema Natioanal School have two and one respectively, according to the figures released. Both of these schools are have prefab rental costs of €13,899.
Also on the list is Kilrickle National School, where €9,628 is spent on prefabs. Galway has the third highest number of prefabs in the country.
“The juggernaut of waste from Fianna Fáil and the Department of Education trundles on and it is children, parents and teachers in East Galway that are paying the price,” Deputy Burke stated.
“When one considers that many of these schools are waiting for extensions to existing buildings or replacement of existing dilapidated schools for many years, 10 years plus in some cases, it is only now that we can see how wasteful this policy is,” the Fine Gael TD added.
The deputy for Galway East criticised the Government for renting accommodation for long periods rather than just building classrooms.
“In may cases permanent building extensions could have been provided for this expenditure, as some schools have annual bills in the region of €42,167.93 per annum, like Gael School Riabhach in Loughrea, Oranmore National School, €76,258 for seven prefabs or Galway Educate Together,” he continued.
“In virtually all of these cases, the State could have built at least one or two classrooms for the money it spent renting out temporary accommodation over the period. It is a shocking waste of taxpayers’ money and a terrible indictment of how Fianna Fáil treats schools and their building needs
Deputy Burke also had a number of suggestions for his Dáil colleague, Minister Batt O’Keeffe.
“The Department of Education should set a limit on the length of time any school waits for their capital needs to be obtained. It should renegotiate the contracts around these prefabs, as rents in the residential and commercial sectors have fallen over recent time. It should immediately change the tendering process to take out all of the unnecessary time wasting. Most importantly, it should get on with spending money to build school buildings, rather then hand it back to the Department of Finance because of a failure to get building underway,” he claimed.
The Fine Gael TD added that he understood the current prefabs were imported from the UK through Northern Ireland “denying Irish companies and workers the opportunity to work in Ireland or locally”.
However a spokesman for the Department of Education and Science said that Deputy Burke’s charge of being wasteful was “misleading on several counts”.
In 2008, the Department of Education introduced a policy change that allowed schools to buy prefabs rather than rent them if they were needed for more than three years.
“The minister introduced the measures as part of efforts to dramatically cut the prefab rental bill and deliver better value for taxpayers’ money,” according to the Department.
“Over 210 schools have now been approved funding to buy prefabs with the option of building permanent classrooms. Of that, 61 opted to buy prefabs while 60 chose to use the grant aid to build permanent classrooms. The rest have yet to indicate their preference,” said the spokesman. “These figures show that we are making real progress on the prefab reform agenda.”
The department claimed that the minister’s priority is to cut the incidence of long-term rental and is now awaiting a report “which reviewed contract terms with suppliers and investigated all existing rental contracts between schools and suppliers so that ways to reduce overall rental costs can be identified”.
The department spokesman said that tender prices for ‘many’ new projects were coming down up to 30% from peak times and “the minister will be able to deliver a similar-sized programme of large and small-scale building projects in primary schools this year, as was delivered last year”.

 

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