IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:I want a warm and bright building for my daughter's school. Is that too much to ask for? asks ADAM BROPHY.
THE ELDER goes to the Gaelscoil in Clonakilty. It’s brilliant. Her teacher is brilliant. The principal is brilliant. The kids are brilliant. The building is not brilliant.
The school appears buried into the side of a hill, an implausible incarceration made possible due to the fact that the whole thing is constructed from a combination of prefabs and long-distance haulage containers.
From a certain angle it has a post-apocalyptic hue to it. Think the first Terminator film. When Kyle describes his time in the machine-dominated future, he and the surviving humans live in a bunker not dissimilar to the elder’s school.
Fortunately, our version of the 21st century is decorated with class photos and rings with the high-pitched squeal of child’s play as opposed to the wails of a disenfranchised species.
However, if the kids spend much longer in this building the sounds may begin to achieve a similar tone.
Mould rots the walls, ceilings and gutters. Heat evaporates out Perspex windows. You walk through the shadowy corridors like a Hobbit intent on the destruction of a ring in the bowels of Mordor. In the interior, no light prevails.
Over time it has dawned on me. This isn’t a school, not as I know schools. This is a refugee camp in a third-world country that has been passed off as a school for 10 years. For the privilege of staying in this shanty town, the school, ie the Government, ie, you and me, pays over €250,000 every year to a duo of landlords.
Ten years at 250 grand. Comes to a nice, round €2.5 million in rent so far.
And yet nothing, nothing at all, is owned.
There is a solution. Land has been bought and zoned for a new school on the other side of town, bought three years ago for €650,000. The land sits empty and the prefab rent is paid on, and on.
In a 30-year mortgage application for the €3 million estimated to build this new home, the school was advised the annual repayments would be about €210,000 per annum. That was last September, before rates dropped. Still a full €40,000 less than the rent currently being paid every year.
In a nutshell: if a new school were built we, the taxpayer, would save a large chunk of change every year and the building industry would have a lucrative and worthy project to throw a number of currently idle and despondent pairs of hands at.
Why hasn’t the ground been broken yet?
Nobody knows.
Still the rent is paid on. Is the country broke with rising unemployment figures the like of which have never before been seen? Um, yeah. The rent is paid on.
In any large organisation such odd appropriation of funds would result in that entity finding itself swiftly consigned to the ever-increasing pile of defunct ex-cash cows. But this is Ireland plc and no amount of handwringing from parents, teachers, boards of management or tear-stained, frozen, Irish-speaking children can get this thing built. In a country that built itself inside out, this school will not be built.
This story is ignored because it is small beer. There are similar ones throughout the State, all now overshadowed by the plight of the nation as it crumbles inwards. The money has gone, the jobs are gone, an emergency Budget looms and we must all bite our lips and swear to plough on for the common good.
Our extra input, we are told, could make all the difference. We are told that and expected to believe it as the wasteland rent is paid on.
How many other cases are there where the smallest bit of common sense in decision making and a proactive and far-sighted attitude towards development could have saved millions?
All by the by. I want my kids to go to a school where the teachers are dedicated (tick), where they are safe and respected by their peers (tick), which reflects my own personal values (tick). I’d also like it to be warm and bright.
Shock and horror, I wouldn’t mind an information technology infrastructure with access to modern teaching aids. I might be pushing it now, but space for them to play and take part in sports would also add value.
If the weather is bad, as occasionally it is, it would be fantastic if there was a large open space indoors for them to run riot in.
I would like this seeming Nirvana to be provided by my Government as a matter of course.
Am I asking too much?