Fianna Fáil has been accused of reneging on a commitment it made in the run-up to the last general election to build a new national school in Macroom, Co Cork.
Management and parents at Aghina National School say they had been led to believe that a much-needed new school would be built.
In a Department of Education memo, seen by The Irish Times, its own staff recommended that a new school be built on a site adjacent to the existing school.
However, earlier this year, the Department of Education decided that the new school would receive a grant of only €250,000, rather than the full €666,000 necessary to build the new school.
"I believe Fianna Fáil used an electoral ploy in the run-up to the general election," Mr Diarmuid Kellegher, the school principal, told The Irish Times. "It is apparent that the only thing stopping this is political interference."
"There is a discrepancy between the Department and the Minister [for Education's] own office," he said. "The Minister's office is saying there is a problem with the enrolment [at the school] and the costs of the new school, while the Department's staff have given the project the go-ahead."
Although he had never been told he could not build a new school, the €250,000 allocation would not go far enough to address the problems at the school, he said.
In recent years, Aghina National School has witnessed a decline in the number of parents choosing to enrol their children as students there. This is as a result of the poor condition of the school, which dates back to 1912, and continued uncertainty about its future.
In a letter to the school's principal three months before the election, local Fianna Fáil TD Mr Donal Moynihan stated that he was "delighted with the news I got today from the Minister for Education and Science that Aghina National School have been given the go-ahead to proceed to tender."
Subsequently, the school was included in the school building programme of Mr Dempsey, the Minister for Education, under the new school category.
However, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education said this was subject to a review of the school's enrolment and the achievement of significant cost savings on the project.
While she acknowledged that it was planned to authorise the project in 2003, it had also been shown that no significant cost savings on the project were achievable.
Although both the local inspector and the Department's planning section had advised that numbers at the school should increase if a new school was built, the school would not have sufficient pupils to become a three-teacher school.
In a statement last night, Mr Moynihan said he had made "repeated and persistent" representations to Mr Dempsey on behalf of the Aghina school community.
His commitment to getting a new school built had, he said, been recognised both by Mr Dempsey and others.