‘We should send out a clear message that the people of Newcastle deserve a secondary school’

THE area of Newcastle is in real need of a secondary school, last month’s Clondalkin Area Committee meeting heard.

Councillors at the meeting agreed to send a letter to the Minister for Education, Ms Norma Foley, asking her to plan for a secondary school in the area.

Chair Councillor Francis Timmons (Ind) said that Newcastle had become “huge” with thousands of houses and that the area has one primary school that is “bursting at the seams” and a second primary school for which planning was sent in in February.

“But we’ve no secondary school and the Department’s response is to build a school in Citywest,” he said, adding that the residents of Newcastle strongly oppose this idea for many reasons.

“One is that it is a bit of a logistics nightmare to get to Citywest from Newcastle, we don’t have the public transport in place to do even that, so it’s going to be out of reach,” Cllr Timmons said.

The Holy Family school in Rathcoole is struggling to take in students from Newcastle, which was a feeder school, because Rathcoole likewise has got so big, and Saggart has got so big, according to Cllr Timmons.

“We really need to support a secondary school for Newcastle, … I really think we should send out a clear message that the people of Newcastle deserve a secondary school,” said Cllr Timmons, who added that he also brought the matter up at the County Development plan.

“It was written in that the Council accepted the general principle of it but there’s no commitment made, of course the Department of Education decides where the schools go,” he said.

Councillor William Carey (SF) said he had very little confidence in how the Department of Education are acting when it comes to building schools.

“They don’t seem to be prepared to take on board the necessary ideas that we need to restrict the need for people to travel large distances to and from schools,” he said.

Cllr Carey added that he had four grandchildren living in Newcastle, all of school going age.

“All are going to school outside the Newcastle area, they’re all in Clondalkin,” he said.

Cllr Timmons added that the motion was really about creating sustainable communities. “We all know children do better when they go to school locally, with local friends and these are lifelong relationships they build up so … we hope that the Minister can reconsider,” he added.