The ongoing fiasco regarding over subscription of Holy Family NS in Rivervalley is an example corporate greed overruling public need. The temporary site is nothing short of a joke.
Essentially the situation should have never came to fruition, in the mid 1990s Bovale Development promised to build a primary school site as part of Boriamhe, and Fingal CC development plan. However this never came to pass and the proposed school was scrapped in place of housing as they were more profitable to the developer.
Ridgewood was then developed and essentially we created a massive area with a population growth of over 100% in two decades and they failed to build an additional primary school. We instead included all the newly developed areas in the same school parish boundary. Fingal County Council are blaming the department of education and education and training board, but they are all to blame. Today’s school crises for many parents and their children is as a result of reactive political decisions that hold short term corporate gains but neglect the long term needs of the community. A lack of infrastructure is not surprising and not good enough we need to create pro active political decision making that puts the needs of the communities first.
The temporary site is factually at present a car park on the Main Street of Swords adjoining swords central, essentially the busiest area of the village during peak hours so the department of education feel that junior infant children are ideal for such a congested and traffic heavy area, how many more examples of down right scandalous decision making do these families and parents affected need to go through before a proposal becomes an actual reality, schools shouldn’t be created as a reaction to bad planning, we need to hold those responsible. The people that created the problems of the past will not solve them in the future, vote for change.