Over 1,000 pupils have no school to go to. Parents are in the situation of scrambling to come up with a plan for how to take care of their children. With 42 schools now to be inspected, this seems to be the tip of the iceberg. How many more pupils are being taught in schools with an 80% chance of a wall falling down in the event of a storm? By the end of the mid-term break, there could be tens of thousands of pupils facing that nightmare situation.

This is a consequence of the race to the bottom model in the construction industry, a model of putting profits before people's lives, in this case the lives of children. This is a model which resulted in London Grenfell and brought us Priory Hall, Longboat Quay and this crisis. It is a model that has to end. It is a model in which the Government and the State have been active participants. In 2009, the then Minister for Education and Skills, Batt O'Keeffe, boasted about the reduction of 30% in prices achieved for the construction of schools. How exactly did he think that would be achieved? It was achieved by awarding lowest price contractors who were involved in cutting corners. Western Building Systems clearly epitomised what that model meant. It is known within the industry as a bottom feeder and horror stories abound about its practices. One need just look at its books. It has 45 staff yet it built 25 schools in the past three and a half years. It is part of a model of subcontracting and bogus self-employment.

The Government can respond that this is the fault of the builders’ party, Fianna Fáil. However, the Government has wilfully ignored the evidence before it of unsafe practices. These issues have been repeatedly raised with the Department, including under the Tánaiste’s watch, by trade unionists. In today’s Irish Examiner Michael Clifford outlined how problems with fire standards in the Educate Together school in Rush-Lusk were uncovered in 2014 with an architect concluding the building could collapse in 20 minutes. Michael Clifford stated:

The matter was kept quiet... Joining dots might have opened a wider problem. Everybody left well [enough] alone.

A year later a journalist, Fiachra Ó Cionnaith, wrote about it and after that, for the best part of the year, the results were kept secret. Why were they kept secret? Most importantly, why did the Department of Education and Skills pay an extra €60 million to this company after which these matters had become public?

Yesterday, the Taoiseach proudly said that this is not a case of public private partnerships. However, it is the same essential logic with the design-build contracts in operation. When one has a private company allowed to design, to build and employ the certifier for essential public buildings, it is a recipe for the disasters like we have in this case. It is an invitation to cut corners, yet the Government continues to use these contracts. Does the Tánaiste agree these contracts should be ended? Does he agree that the received wisdom of relying on private for-profit companies to deliver essential State infrastructure has decisively been undermined and that we need a public construction company which will put safety, workers’ rights and quality first?

I am less interested in the party political slagging match and much more interested in reassuring parents, families, teachers and principals that we can fix this. We are talking about a different era of standards and inspection systems which have changed quite dramatically since 2014. We are talking about pre-Grenfell, after which the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, undertook the inspection of public buildings to make sure that mistakes made in the UK were not made here. What we are focused on now – I thank Opposition spokespersons for their assistance on this yesterday - is trying to ensure we can reassure staff and children that we will put contingency plans in place and prioritise their safety.

The Taoiseach and the Minister for Education and Skills visited two schools this morning to send a clear signal but the Government will prioritise this and ensure all of the schools built by this company will be inspected in the coming days. This will allow us to understand where there are problems, fix them and put contingencies in place for the schoolchildren and their families for the time it might take.

There is a list of schools which are yet to be inspected. There are grounds to expect some of them will be fine. Some of them will not need to take children and staff outside of school while some repairs might have to take place. There are other schools where there may be dangers to which we need to respond with safety as the first priority.

I ask Members to work with us. Rather than trying to organise protests, we need to organise a calm whereby we can work with principals, boards of management and parents to ensure that, after the mid-term break, if certain schools are going to be discommoded for a temporary period of time, that we do that in as efficient a way as possible that prioritises children and staff in terms of safety and education. That is what we need to do together. There will be plenty of time after we do that for a political debate on what happened, how it happened, can we learn lessons and make changes to ensure it does not happen again.

Schools which are being built today, in terms of independent inspection and certification, are operating to a very different model on-site than what happened before 2014. We should not pretend such progress has not been made.

It is disingenuous of the Tánaiste to counterpose the question of fixing the problem and having a discussion about why it happened. If we do not discover why the problem happened, then we are going to be faced with the problem repeatedly.

I have heard from people involved in the construction industry that it will probably be necessary to knock some of the schools in question and totally rebuild them which will involve two years. This will create a massive dislocation for parents and schoolchildren. Has the Tánaiste any information on that? It seems to be the case that Western Building Systems was involved in building hospitals. Are those buildings being inspected? Why were the results of safety audits from 2016 not released for an entire year? Design-build contracts continue to be used by various Departments. In May 2018, the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, told the Dáil, “For public sector design-build contracts, the assigned certifier is employed directly by the client.” We still have a problem and we still have public contracts going out under this model.

Under the current regulations, in terms of pre-2014 buildings and certification around that, the contractor and contractors’ design team were fully responsible for ensuring quality and certifying that the buildings were constructed in accordance with the works requirements and building regulations at the time.

Since then, under current regulation, an independent assigned certifier is appointed. The assigned certifier gathers and relies on ancillary certificates, which must be provided by the contractor. Responsibility for the design and execution of the works in compliance with the building regulations remains with the contractor and the design team for the build contract. What we have now is independent certification and inspection on site, which reflects the concerns that many people have in terms of reliance on contractors and their design teams in their entirety pre-2014. Now, it seems we have seen in some cases the results of this in our schools, although many good schools were also built in that period by many good builders.

Not by Western Building Systems.

With regard to healthcare facilities, at this point there is no reason to believe hospitals are affected but we are going to take a precautionary approach and the HSE is determining what projects have been-----

It built the Beaumont Hospital extension and the Temple Street hospital extension.

-----completed by Western Building Systems. We will, of course, follow up to ensure there are no issues. I am told by the Department of Health that it does not expect significant issues.