Blow to a community

Dear Sir,

With regard to the current stage of affairs at Scoil Brid, Faughart, let me raise the following points. It is now far more than just the closing of the school, as it is the slow disingtegration of a community. Sports days, Christmas Sales of Work, table quizzes and the get together of parents at the school gates, as rall the main ingredients of what makes a community work.

When you take all these out of a community what are you left with?

So far the Board of Management, the Department of Education and the INTO have washed heir hands to the answer to this question.

Children who have learned together over the past few years, now have been separated from each other and their earliest friendships destroyed, not counting the expense where parents have to drive their children to another school with a daily round trip of up to twenty miles daily. The future children of the townland of Faughart will now grow up not knowing, who their next door neightbours are, unless the current issue is resolved.

The current Parents Council of the school have been treated with extreme ignorance by all concerned, when all they wished for was the best possible education for their children, something every mum and dad would aspire to, furniture and various other learning needs lie dormant in a vacant building, having been carefully acquired over generations who cared about and valued the existence of their school and their community, they deserve better than the current mileu that now exists - anybody would.

I do not live in Faughart and I’m not even a parent, but I do recognise the shame and heartache that this situation has affected the parish as a whole, because of imcompetence, arrogance and inaction, it’s Faughart today, but where else tomorrow?

Yours sincerely,

Peter Treanor,

32 Bridge Street, Dundalk