Teachers and parents at Kilcoskan Primary School in north Co Dublin held an emergency meeting last night to discuss their opposition to the proposed new prison complex at Thornton. Frank McNally reports.
Principal Mr Kevin Duffy says the location for the 150-acre prison campus is a "crazy, crazy planning decision". The 65-student school will share its country road with the prison entrance.
The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, has said he will consider building a new school for Kilcoskan if that is what locals want. But Mr Duffy is not interested. "We're not for sale," he said. "Our intention is to stop this thing if we can."
Officially named the Francis Taylor National School, after a martyred and now beatified former lord mayor of Dublin, Kilcoskan has fought a decade-long struggle to survive after dwindling enrolment and a lack of funding threatened to close it in the early 1990s.
The community recently turned down a pre-fab extension in favour of a bricks-and-mortar one even though this meant raising €70,000. That extension is due to officially open in late February.
Mr Duffy says the road to the school is already considered sufficiently dangerous that local people cannot get planning permission for houses. And as the only access route from the N2 to the "biggest prison in Europe", it would no longer be compatible with a school. "It's not the people inside we're worried about; it's the people outside."
Although the school is barely a kilometre off the N2, local people have led "sheltered lives", he admits.
"The GPO is nine miles away as the crow flies, but you could be in a remote part of the west of Ireland. It's an idyllic life."
Local resident Senator Joe O'Toole raised the issue of the school in informal talks with Mr McDowell.
He said the Minister had promised to consider building a new school if required - a point confirmed yesterday by a Department spokesman.
Speaking last night, Mr O'Toole stressed he did not want to see the prison going ahead. "But it's very difficult to see anyone stopping it. So the question must be: what can we get out of this for the community?"
Mr Duffy also accepts that "it looks like [ the prison] will happen". He insists, however, that the community has no choice but to fight it.
"People like the school. There's not much else left here. We had a post office, and we lost that too. So we don't want to sit here and just let this happen.
"The day it was announced last week, people hung around the gate after school. They didn't know what to do. It was like a death in the community."