College pays €6,000 a day to rent rooms to teach in

A TEACHER training college in Limerick is spending up to €6,000 a day teaching classes in hotels and primary schools because the Government has failed to provide it with new buildings to deal with growing student numbers.

Mary Immaculate College has to rent space at a cost of €150,000 a year. “This is a huge waste of public money,” college president Dr Peader Cremin said yesterday as he opened the annual summer school for primary teachers in Limerick.

Dr Cremin said the major colleges of education had been “devastated” by the Government’s moratorium on new third-level buildings announced last November.

“We have delivered massively for the education system in terms of numbers of new primary teachers, but the Government has not provided the new buildings,” he said.

Faced with a teacher shortage, the colleges of education were given pre-fabs by the Governmentover the last 40 years instead of investing in new buildings.

Mary Immaculate College has had no new buildings for 25 years. It can hold 800 students, yet has 2,300 full-time students to meet the teacher shortage.

Dr Cremin said the Department of Education and Science had agreed with the college a building master plan in 1999.

“We were given absolute assurances by successive ministers that our programme was a priority for the

department.”

Dr Cremin said the then minister, Micheál Martin, in 1999 wrote to tell him “the development of the college is a priority for my department”.

“Our buildings are still all the same,” said Dr Cremin. “Mary Immaculate College is now renting facilities from hotels and schools for conducting its core business at quite considerable cost of up to €6,000 a day.

Planning permission has been granted for a first phase of building costing €5 million, but this has been stopped by the minister’s November 14 last embargo.”

Mary Immaculate College vice president John Coady said: “We have to prepare 1,200 under-graduates and 240 full-time post-graduates for teaching practice.

"Due to the fact we can only cater for 290 students in our largest lecture theatre, we have to hire out hotels and schools because of the lack of new buildings on the college campus.”

A spokesman for the Department of Education said the Higher Education Authority was reviewing all capital projects in the third level sector to establish prioritisation and agree re-phasing in preparation for a building programme in 2004 and beyond.