INTO CONFERENCE:INTO DELEGATES have condemned the "criminal waste of public funds'' on temporary prefab accommodation.
More than €112 million was spent on the rental of school prefabs between 2006 and 2008. A further €48 million will be spent on rents this year.
Last year €32 million was spent by the department on purchasing temporary structures for schools.
A Portlaoise delegate, Niamh Campion, said at the largest school in the town, Scoil Bhríde, three-quarters of the 600 pupils were being taught in prefabs.
The school currently had 25 prefabs, the majority purchased by the department. However, it also rented nine prefabs at a cost of €125,000 per year.
Ms Campion said all of this represented a shocking waste of taxpayers’ money, resources, which could be used to build permanent, school buildings and generate employment.
Delegates heard that prefabs – intended as temporary accommodation – had become a permanent feature at some schools for more than 40 years.
Another Portlaoise delegate, Kieran Brosnan, said the department had still to accept an innovative proposal made by the local parish. This, he said, had the capacity to solve the accommodation crisis while saving the exchequer money.
He explained how the parish wanted to build a new 32-room classroom structure to replace what he called a “prefab village’’ in another parish school. The parish was prepared to build and finance these schools at a cost of €18-25 million. It wants the department to cover the annual interest payment at a cost of €1.8 million.
He compared this proposal with the current situation in which the department was paying €48,000 per year in rent on prefabs at the schools. After 25 years the school would have paid €1.2 million in rent.
More than 200 schools across the country are spending more than €100,000 annually renting prefab accommodation, according to recent figures released by the Department of Education.
A total of 210 schools have prefab rental costs of more than €100,000 each year, and a further 184 schools are paying more than €50,000 to lease temporary classroom accommodation from private companies.
The rental of prefabs is overseen on an individual basis by school boards of management, which generally comprise of volunteers, parents or parish priests, and then paid for by the Department of Education. Rental costs for the buildings can vary greatly and depend on rates offered by local companies.
The department has ordered a full review of its renting of temporary accommodation.
