Conditions at Carrowreagh National School in south Co Sligo are such that the board of management chairman, Father Pat Peyton, is "ashamed" to ask teachers to work in it.
The school, built in 1883, consists of two draughty classrooms and an even chillier corridor-cloakroom area. There is no indoor toilet. The concrete floor of the outdoor toilets is covered with pools of water and soggy leaves blown in through the open doors. The wooden classroom windows are crumbling with rot in places. Bare light bulbs hang from the ceiling. Apart from the closed-up fireplaces and the oil-heated radiators, little appears to have changed since the 1950s.
A resource teacher, who visits the school two days a week to help children with special needs, runs her classes in the corridor. There are two Downs Syndrome children among the 46 pupils.
Parents threatened to withdraw their children from the school several times, as frustration grew while they waited for work to start on a new school building. In December, they threatened a boycott from January 11th unless they received a written assurance from the Minister for Education that work would begin in the new year.
The boycott was called off when the Department confirmed that notices would appear in last Friday's national newspapers inviting contractors to apply for inclusion on the tender lists. The actual tender documents will not be ready for some weeks.
Father Peyton welcomed the breakthrough but says parents are sceptical because progress has been so slow in the past. They were first promised a new school six years ago, he says.
He believes the delay has cost the taxpayer a lot of money. "The original figure for the new school was £250,000, but the last quotation we got was £500,000."
The new school will be built in the centre of the village of Bunnanaddan, some hundred yards from the existing one, and will be an amalgamation of Carrowreagh and another two-teacher school at Doocastle, four miles away. Based on current numbers, the four-teacher school should have about 75 pupils.
The school is unlikely to open its doors until well into the first year of the new millennium, a delay which Father Peyton finds unacceptable. He says he first approached the Department over the state of Carrowreagh National School when he arrived in the parish six years ago.
"At that stage we thought we would have the new school within two years," he says. Under the regulations at that time, the parents had to collect 15 per cent of the total building cost and they started fundraising. The only small consolation for them now is that under recent reforms, the Department pays 95 per cent.
Father Peyton says the parents set about raising the £37,000 which would be their share of the £250,000 cost, and with a successful parish lotto, this was collected by May 1996.
A spokesman for the Department said he did not accept there had been any "undue delay". He said the project got the official go-ahead only in the capital programme of May 1996 and it had then to go through the planning process. On cost, he said he was aware only of the original estimate of £250,000 and could not say how much the bill would come to.
The spokesman said the Government had made money available for capital projects and he could guarantee the school would be built. It was likely to go to tender before Easter and the tender documents would be ready within "a very short period".
In Bunnanaddan, some people suggest the recent flurry of activity could be linked to forthcoming local and European elections.
Father Peyton has stopped making predictions or promises. "All I say is that we will have a new school when I have the key to let the teachers in."