It is almost exactly two months since Deputy McGinley and I found ourselves in this situation regarding another school in Donegal. Last October parents from Loch an Iúir national school withdrew their children from classes in protest at the unsafe conditions in which their children were forced to attend school.
Today the parents of 119 pupils at Gortahork national school have found themselves in the same situation. They have been forced into this action because of the extreme situation they find themselves in. The local Sinn Féin representative for the area, Mr. Pearse Doherty, brought the matter to my attention early last week. There are differences, of course. In Loch an Iúir, the health problem was dangerously high radon gas levels, while in Gortahork raw sewage and rats are the problems. A meeting of the parents took place on Monday night and they reluctantly decided to take this action as a way of highlighting the unacceptable conditions in the school.
Children from the ages of four and five upwards are expected to use a playground that overflows with raw, untreated sewage at high tide. The sewage has resulted in high levels of e.coli being detected in the playground and because of the position and layout of the playground, the sewage does not flow back, but remains in the playground, preventing access to the playground for children.
With sewage comes rats, a number of which have been detected within the school grounds. Parents are legally obliged to send their children to school and so parents, by law, must send their children to a rat-infested, sewage-swamped environment. Despite the best efforts of teachers and management, there is nothing they can do without resources and so parents have been forced to take direct action. I applaud them for their courage and their determination in standing up for their children and their rights. It is a move born of frustration with the Government's policy on school building, a frustration shared by parents across the State.
When I raised the plight of Gortahork national school with the Minister for Education and Science last year he stated that health and safety issues at the school are a matter for the management authorities of the school. The escalation in the seriousness of the problem, as demonstrated by the decision of the parents to withdraw their children, underlines the fact that the management authorities do not have the ability or resources to deal with these issues.
The Government cannot be allowed to wash its hands of schools like Gortahork national school, abandoning it to its own devices. In his response to a question I put to him the Minister stated: "It is not a matter for my Department to provide funding from the annual allocation for primary buildings for works external to the site of a primary school." Does the Department of Education and Science seriously consider a school's playground to be external to the site of the school?
Aside from these chronic health and safety issues, the school building itself dates back to 1927 and suffers from severe structural problems, lacking any kind of canteen facilities. Initially built for 30 pupils, it now has over four times that number and the principal's office comprises a telephone on a window ledge.
At what point does the Government stop abdicating its responsibility to the pupils and teachers of the school? When is the Government going to deliver a safe, comfortable environment for students to learn in and teachers to teach in? Will the Minister in his response explain why a rat-infested, structurally inadequate school with a severe sewage problem is not a priority for repair? I cannot understand that system. There is no point in using the money provided by the Department to kill rats when the sewage problem will attract them anyway.
The situation is not eased by the fact that the Gortahork sewerage scheme was not included for upgrading in the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government's water services investment programme last year and I join my colleagues in the constituency in calling on the Government to prioritise investment there to deal with the serious effluent problem in coastal waters.