No excuse for rotting schools

WHEN Education Minister Noel Dempsey recently embarked on his successful blitz to sell the Government’s offer on supervision and substitution to secondary teachers, it was suggested he would be better employed touring the country’s rotting schools.

In a further broadside, parents are now urging the Comptroller and Auditor General, the State’s spending watchdog, to examine the cost of renting school buildings and prefabs which they believe would be better spent on new facilities.

Taxpayers’ money is being spent propping up nearly half the country’s 3,200 primary schools, hundreds of them dilapidated or in serious disrepair because of a chronic lack of investment. If Mr Dempsey pleads the coffers are empty, he has only the Government’s pre-election splurge to blame. Whatever the excuse, it is unacceptable for his department to be pouring millions into prefabs instead of bricks and mortar.