School forced to spend €80,000 on prefabs as funding delay hits building plans

A CLARE school has spent €80,000 on prefab classrooms because no progress is being made on a long-awaited new building.

The 706-pupil Ennis National School received money from the Department of Education last year to stop dampness caused by continuous leaking from its 1970s flat-roof design.

But, according to principal Garry Stack, children and teachers in the main building are experiencing ongoing damp conditions.

“We’ve had a number of teachers and pupils whose health has been affected by the environment in the school. The internal downpipes just take the water from the roof and spread the dampness equally around the school,” Mr Stack said.

In order to keep class sizes down, Ennis NS has split new entrants into three classes of 30 for over a decade. This has required extra staff and rooms, with the school board borrowing €80,000 last summer to bring up to 11 the number of prefabs in the yard.

A protest meeting at ongoing delays in funding for a new school was attended by more than 350 parents on Monday night. Mr Stack said primary schools should be registered as a charity because parents constantly have to support fundraisers to make up for lack of Government funding.

The school board has sanction from the Department of Education for a new school and a site is available on the grounds of St Flannan’s College. The €5 million project was to be built as a Public Private Partnership (PPP) but remains on the waiting list for funding because of delays on the PPP model for building new schools.

Last night, a department spokeswoman said a decision on further works at Ennis NS depends on whether the school is approved as a PPP project.

Irish National Teachers Organisation central executive member Declan Kelleher said it is ironic that schools are still run down while their staff are introducing a new curriculum with subjects such as science and information technology.

“Since modernisation is now the buzzword of the Department of Education, it’s about time the Minister for Education ensured that conditions in primary schools are modernised too,” he said.

“We must put an end, for once and for all, to damp leaky buildings surrounded by ever-growing forests of prefabricated buildings which are a useless long-term investment,” said Mr Kelleher.