Cianan Brennan: Hot school meals mess needs a rational solution

The withdrawal of providers due to onerous new conditions around waste and staffing needs to be sorted, and quickly, writes Cianan Brennan

(Left to right) Ray Nangle, CEO of the Lunch Bag; Rosaleen Hyde, operations manager at Ballymaloe Foods; Ger Killian, managing director at the Lunch Bag and Maxine Hyde, general manager of Ballymaloe Foods at Ballymaloe House, Cork, after Ballymaloe Foods and The Lunch Bag renewed their partnership which will see 600,000 children in Ireland eating a hot school meal every month. Photo: Patrick Browne

Hot school meals were a long time coming for Irish primary schools.

A staple in other countries, the concept of a hot meal as part of your child’s daily education routine was and is something of a foreign concept to Irish parents. It has been a very welcome one.

First announced in 2018 by then social protection minister Regina Doherty, hot lunches were introduced on a pilot basis to 36 schools across the country with an initial outlay of €1m by the State, rising to €2.5m for the following year.

While progress on introducing the service was slow (not helped by the arrival of a once-in-a-hundred-years pandemic), take-up, which is voluntary on the part of the schools, has been exponential over the past 18 months.

From 189 schools in 2021, more than 2,000 schools were being catered for in April of 2024. That figure had risen to 2,850 by April of this year, with 475,000 children then eligible to receive a hot meal at that time.

It’s hard to overstate the impact those meals have had. Here I can speak from experience – our own school has been in receipt of hot meals since the start of this year. It was a long-time coming – at least 12 months passed between a final commitment in early 2024 from the Government before the service was contracted for and put into operation. But it was worth the wait.

Our kids would get a different meal each day, in a compostable container. Ordering online was a matter of simplicity for whenever someone arbitrarily decided they didn’t like something.

Anything uneaten would come home after school, where it would inevitably be consumed by yours truly. The food was good quality and, miracle of miracles, the children liked it.

Not everyone was overjoyed. Some other parents complained of excessive food waste but I would consider that very much a first-world problem.

What kind of impacts has this had? As with anything, the answer depends on individual circumstances.

Ireland has major problems with housing access, inequality and food poverty. The difference that meal could make for a child who might otherwise go hungry is incalculable, and is a empirically a good thing.

For children lucky enough to grow up not knowing what it is to go hungry, the programme is a major help to working parents who are suddenly no longer under quite so much pressure to provide a nutritious lunch for the world’s toughest audience. 

So while the scheme may be pooh-poohed by the haves, it has unquestionably made life a great deal better for some, and represents a major achievement by Government – not an accolade handed out too frequently.

Which makes the current impasse between suppliers and schools even more unfortunate.

Impasse

Last Friday, it emerged that 10 rural schools in Co Clare had been informed by their supplier, Tipperary-based The Lunch Bag (which also serves our school), that their service was to be withdrawn with immediate effect. Some 291 pupils are affected by the withdrawal.

The reasoning for the decision was a purely business one – new guidance had been issued to suppliers by the Schools Procurement Unit on foot of updated food safety regulations issued by industry watchdog the Food Safety Authority of Ireland.

Those new regulations include new systems to be put in place by schools to dispose of food waste. No longer can food be sent home, something I suspect had become a distinct perk of the system for less well-off families.

In addition, food now has to be prepared on site and consumed within two hours – and school staff are no longer allowed to assist in that function, meaning a need for additional staff on the part of the supplier.

The issue has since snowballed. Several suppliers have now indicated that they will be withdrawing from schools where providing the service is no longer financially viable. 

Thousands of children will be affected, predominantly in isolated areas. Schools in Clare, Galway, and Kerry have all been affected, and doubtless more will follow.

Apparently the thinking behind the school no longer being permitted to assist in the production of meals is to prevent them from morphing into food-business concerns. Fair enough. 

Bad handling

But the lack of joined-up thinking here would be comical if it wasn’t so serious. For starters, guidance like this cannot just drop without any prior warning. 

If one considers that the FSAI had been in the process of drafting updated food safety standards for several months at the minimum, how did the Schools Procurement Unit only issue guidance on foot of those new regulations on the eve of the back to school rush last Wednesday, far too late for its impact to be mitigated in any meaningful manner?

Further, what is the thinking behind not allowing food to be sent home? In one swoop you remove a commonsense aspect to the scheme and replace it with a giant headache for the schools, one which they would have had no preparation for.

Perhaps the problem here is a common one among State bodies – the various vested interests are siloed from each other, and not communicating with each other.

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The Schools Procurement Unit is part of the Department of Education. But that department is not responsible for the scheme – the Department of Social Protection is.

So the SPU acts on guidance from the FSAI, causing a snafu which sees a major investment programme by Social Protection materially affected. This situation should never have happened.

The Lunch Bag is the only supplier affected which has been named to date. It's a decent-sized company, with €17.1m in turnover for the financial year ending July 2024, and its management sees the situation in simple terms. 

The changes would see the cost of supplying these rural schools as too high given the daily funding rate of €3.20 per pupil funded by the State. School meals done right are a noble profession, but these companies exist to make profit. If they can’t do so they will pull the service, and understandably so.

Meanwhile, the Department of Social Protection is sticking to its guns, saying that the recent “refinements” to the procurement system will serve to “strengthen” the programme by “ensuring consistent standards across all participating schools”.

“While it is recognised that delivering meals to smaller or more remote schools may present challenges, the shared priority of all partners in the programme must be that every child benefits from a service where the primary consideration is that the food they eat is safe, nutritious, and supportive of their learning,” a spokesperson said, adding that the Government would continue to “constructively engage” on any issues that may arise.

Laudable goals. But the fact is that this change means some children are going to go hungry, and some parents are going to have an unwelcome financial and time pressure back on their shoulders once more after the briefest of respites.

It's up to the ministers concerned - Helen McEntee in Education and Dara Calleary in Social Protection - to find a common sense solution. And fast.