PARENTS at an all Irish school in Ballybrack, Co Dublin, plan to canvass against the Minister for Education at the next election, if a row over recognition for the school is not resolved.
The Labour Party has enjoyed strong support in the largely working class area for more than two decades. If the party fails to capture the "floating vote" in more affluent parts of the constituency, and the school dispute in Ballybrack remains unresolved, then Ms Niamh Bhreathnach's reelection effort in Dun Laoghaire Rathdown could run into serious difficulties.
Scoil Phadraig was set up last year with 12 junior infants, and has 26 pupils on the rolls for this September. Ballybrack Boys Football Club has given the school a temporary home and has offered to take out a loan to build it premises for the medium term.
"That's not going to go ahead now," says one of the parents in the school, Ms Bernie Stapleton. "We're going to be back in one room in the football club."
According to Ms Stapleton, there is considerable bitterness in the area at the way the parents have been treated. "Last year, we lost 20 pupils because of Niamh Bhreathnach. She asked us to move our premises. We moved and we lost 20 children."
When the school opened it did not have enough junior infants enrolled to reach a 20 pupil threshold set by the Department for official recognition and funding. Under the rules then in place the school was allowed to combine the numbers from the first two years in order to reach the threshold.
Those rules were changed without warning last week, and the school's application for recognition was refused.
"We had a meeting with Niamh Bhreathnach last year and she promised us we could combine the two years together to make up our 20 pupils. We've more than 20 pupils now," says Ms Stapleton.
"I'm so angry, it's just unreal. Plus the fact that she's our local Labour representative and she won't speak to us. We've had four appointments with her and three of them she didn't show up to. She hadn't the decency to ring us and tell us she had cancelled them."
At the heart of the row lies a dilemma for the Department of Education that is repeated in Waterford, Maynooth, Trim, Clones, Enniscorthy and Whitehall in Dublin - where the Department has also refused to recognise new Gaelscoileanna.
The Department wants to "rationalise" and amalgamate schools, because the national school going population is falling. But the all Irish sector is growing apace, with an average 10 per cent increase in the number of such schools every year for the past three years.
It is still very small about 5 per cent of all schools are Gaelscoileanna. Nor is there any evidence that the demand for them has peaked in 1993, a national survey on languages by ITE (the linguistics institute), found that almost a third of parents surveyed would send their children to an all Irish school if one was available locally.
This was a slight rise on previous surveys, while a steady 70 per cent of parents in 1973, 1983 and 1993 felt the Government should provide all Irish schools wherever the public wants them.
The row has also exposed a wide gulf between the rhetoric in the White Paper on Education and actual practice. When she launched the White Paper in April, 1995, Ms Breathnach said it was "underpinned" by five fundamental principles - equality, partnership, pluralism, accountability and quality.
The document examined demographic trends and the demand for all Irish schools and multi denominational schools before promising to make it easier for them in the future.
It admitted that all Irish and multi denominational schools were discriminated against in the past, and said that "early recognition of new multi denominational and all Irish schools is listed as a priority in the Government of Renewal policy document".
Despite this promise, one of the changes introduced without warning by the Department last week was a stipulation that the impact on existing schools would be taken into account in assessing applications from new schools.
If such a condition is imposed, it will in effect introduce a new form of discrimination in favour of the church dominated schools already in existence. By making it harder for any alternatives to come into being, the Minister will have copperfastened the denominational character of education in the State.
It is a message that parents associated with the seven schools can be expected to hammer home at local and national level in the coming weeks. At an angry meeting of parents in Dublin last week, tactics for the coming campaign were discussed.
Mr Seosamh Mac Donncha, from Comhdhail Naisuinta na Gaeilge, told the meeting the central issue was participation. "This in effect is an attack on the rights of parents to decide what kind of education they want for their children, and also to decide what kind of participation they want to have in the education system.
"In the White Paper a lot of emphasis was put on nurturing the role of parents within the education system. However, it would appear that doesn't apply to parents who decide they want education through the medium of Irish.
"The Department and the INTO have always prefaced anything they said about the teaching of Irish by saying the schools can't do it alone, the Department can't do it alone, they must get support from the community.
"But in the case of your communities, when you have come together and decided what you want to do in a positive way about the Irish language, the Department has been found wanting," he said.