The Department of Education insists that the publication of a new school building programme - as the Government faced charges of breaking election promises - is "coincidental", writes Sean Flynn, Education Editor.
But Labour yesterday said it was designed to deflect attention from the Government's "fraud" on the electorate.
The new programme was published on the Department's website. It publication came as the former education minister, Dr Michael Woods, stood accused of misleading school communities about the status of planned building projects in the run-up to the general election .
The Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, who has been anxious to distance himself from the Woods affair, became entangled in it after the new list was published. Broadly this list includes provision for additional temporary accommodation for schools, and some new school buildings.
The cost of the new programmes covering 120 schools is estimated at about €9 million. Unusually, funding for the new programme is coming from a special contingency fund. Normally, this is reserved for special emergency funding.
The Department of Education said the publication of the list - on a day when Fianna Fáil was being widely criticised for breaking pre-election promises - was purely coincidental.
But this view was dismissed yesterday by Labour's education spokeswoman, Ms Jan O'Sullivan. "It is no coincidence that this announcement was made as Fianna Fáil and the PDs try to sweep under the carpet the fraudulent promises made to schools in the weeks before the election. Minister Dempsey has yet to explain why he has been unable to deliver on the pledges made by his predecessor," she said.
The Department said the buildings unit in Athlone had been working on the list for the past fortnight. It said the latest list was just the first of a quarterly update on building plans, which had been promised by Mr Dempsey earlier this year.
It appears that the Department of Education press office had no involvement in the publication of the list on the website. No press statement or other details were released to the media. News of it emerged only late on Monday evening when the teaching unions heard about it.
Yesterday, Ms O'Sullivan said the Minister was trying to draw attention away from the "fraud and deceit" of his predecessor prior to the general election.
Last December, The Irish Times published a list of 400 schools where work has been frozen because of Government cutbacks. These include many which remain in a very dilapidated condition.
In all, there are about 3,200 primary schools in the State. At any given time, up to two-thirds of these require refurbishment and/or new temporary accommodation. The total budget for the primary school building programme is about €167 million.
Mr Dempsey confirmed the scale of the cutbacks when he published the list detailing the school-building programme for 2003 in January.