The ghost of building past haunts our schools

IT’S almost Halloween, a time to scare ourselves with stories of the bizarre, the strange, the unforeseen. One particular Tale of the Unexpected, though, has left thousands of parents around the country in a state of genuine dread, and it’s one that won’t disappear along with the last slice of barmbrack.

Entirely out of the blue, they’ve been hit with the real prospect of school closures, all across the country, for what could very well be months on end. For working parents, who’ve built their routines around school times and terms, this is pretty close to a waking nightmare. And the alternative – the continued use of school buildings that might collapse in the next storm – is more terrifying still.

This threat came from nowhere, just as the first term of the school year wound down and the brief mid-term break was in sight. For working parents, any school closure – whether due to holidays, bad weather or in-service days – poses a headache. But what happens if your child’s school has to be knocked down and rebuilt? What happens if it has to be remodelled so thoroughly that it’ll be closed indefinitely? How many lives, schedules, workplaces, households, educations and exam preparations will be cast into chaos then?

Fire safety work at a relatively new north Dublin school last weekend threw up ‘significant structural issues’ and prompted the immediate closure of 18 classrooms.

Even to a lay person, the problems sound grave: outside walls inadequately secured to inner frames, and wooden panels not bolted to steel girders. One teacher outlined the issues they’d encountered when their school, now one of the 42 to be examined for structural safety, first opened. A heavy door came loose and they discovered it had been secured by flimsy spindles rather than strong hinges. A large sheet of plate glass wobbled in its frame. A basketball backboard fell to the ground, and turned out to have been made with indoor-quality plywood. The problems identified in the Balbriggan school could make a wall collapse up to 80% more likely in a high wind, and, given the battering we’ve taken in the year since Storm Ophelia, that’s a very clear and present danger.

Over the mid-term break, engineers will go in to check those 42 schools, all built by the Tyrone-based Western Building Systems. If it turns out that there are costs involved in rectifying any issues, Education Minister Joe McHugh warned, WBS will meet them or ‘we’re going down a different road’. That’ll be cold comfort, though, to parents whose children are without classrooms or, even if alternative premises can be found in the middle of an accommodation crisis, may face huge disruption getting their children to temporary sites further away. And threats of legal action won’t ease the anxiety of those families on tenterhooks next week to find out if their school is one of those which, the Minister has admitted, is probably facing closure.

Western Building Systems is a family business, headed by multi-millionaire Martin McCloskey, which made a profit of more than €3.6million last year alone. At the height of the boom in 2008, WBS won a €25million contract to build six schools here and, Mr McCloskey boasted in an interview at the time that they’d get them up in just five months. He was able to undercut traditional cost structures by up to 30% by building so quickly: ‘What would otherwise take about a year-and-a-half to two years can be done in 20 weeks.’

OR CAN it? What if it really does take two years to build a safe and solid school structure? How lengthy, and how costly, and how enormously disruptive will this debacle be to resolve?

And that’s not even the biggest question facing our politicians as the scale of this episode unfolds.

Why did the Department wait until problems emerged, until walls were apparently in danger of falling down in new schools, before they sent in engineers to examine the workmanship? Why did nobody think it was a good idea to check these projects BEFORE they were signed off? You wouldn’t dream of handing over a fat cheque to the builder who built your extension if you hadn’t overseen every step of the job – so why didn’t our governments take as much care over the supervision of school building, over the accountable use of public funds, as the average householder takes when installing a new kitchen?

The consequences of that failure to properly oversee our building standards, across the entire infrastructure of the country, are truly terrifying.