Principal: It’s not acceptable to be sitting in squalor for another four years

The principal of a school finalising a planning application for a new building has criticised Ruairi Quinn, the education minister, for excluding it from his five-year school construction plan.

Two of the classrooms at Glenville National School in North Cork are in a 1955 building so damp that principal Michael O’Donnell has a dehumidifier constantly running in the corridor.

A “temporary” three- room extension was added to the village school in 1968 but is still in use more than 40 years later, along with two prefab classrooms.