The programme for Government acknowledges that significant Exchequer resources will be invested in capital spending in the education sector yet issues surrounding these publicly procured projects show a series of errors. Following the collapse of Carillion and Sammon there remains a myriad of outstanding issues relating to school building projects including in my constituency. As we discussed earlier, we now learn that there are significant structural and safety concerns relating to 40 schools built by Western Building Systems over the last ten years. Three schools have already faced closure and there is no clear plan from the Department on alternative accommodation.

Does the Taoiseach agree that this latest debacle reflects a significant and unprecedented failure in Government procurement and regulatory frameworks? Will he clarify what specific actions the Minister for Education and Skills has taken or will take to ensure appropriate alternative accommodation is provided for the pupils and teachers affected by this?

I answered these questions to the best of my ability when Deputy Calleary raised them earlier. When we spoke of Carillion and Sammon previously, the Deputy was very critical of PPPs and zeroed in on that as the reason why there was a problem with buildings, however these were not PPPs, they were design build, which indicates that problems can arise in the structure of buildings through all sorts of models. Things have changed since then, since building regulations were changed in 2014-2015, and more recently, in the last couple of years, the Department of Education and Skills now has a clerk of works on site every day. That does not mean that there will not be problems but we will have to check on the schools built after 2014 and 2015, to get a real sense of the extent of this problem.