Carlow IT students plan strike over safety closure

Students at Carlow Institute of Technology are to go on strike tomorrow to protest at the closure of a temporary classroom building on their campus as a result of the college's failure to ensure that a fire safety certificate application arrived at the local county council on time.

Carlow County Council wrote to the college to express its concern "that large numbers of people may be accommodated in a two-storey pre-fabricated building, the details of which have only very recently been submitted to the council for fire safety purposes". The county council said the college's housing of students in such a temporary building without fire safety clearance "poses a very serious worry about life risk". It recommended that the building not be used until the college's fire safety certificate application was determined.

The letter added that the college had committed an offence under the Building Control Act of 1990, and that the council was considering legal proceedings as a result.

Demonstrations have already been held by the students' union in the front hall of the college, but were called off when the college registrar agreed to meet with students. Second-year design students, whose studio was housed in the temporary building, have boycotted their classes, as they are not happy with the arrangements the college has made for them since the temporary building closed.

In all, 16 classrooms have been put out of action by the closure of the building, according to the students' union.

As a result, class timetables were thrown into chaos, with some business courses losing two-thirds of their scheduled classes, according to the students' union president, D J Moore. He says the union has also received complaints of classes being held in classrooms too small for the number of people supposed to attend, and the union has received a number of reports of classrooms being double-booked.

Students are particularly frustrated that this problem results from an administrative oversight rather than a lack of resources, he says. Because of building work on campus, students have also "had to put up with poor ventilation, overcrowding and excessive noise" since they returned to college in October, he adds.