Clarity sought over FET plan promise

Cavan-Monaghan ETB is to write to the Department of Education after learning that an investment of €40M, earmarked for the development of Cavan Institute’s new FET campus “of the future”, no longer appears guaranteed.

ETB hierarchy earlier this year submitted a Preliminary Business Case as requested to SOLAS, the Further Education and Training Authority in Ireland.

The submission was lodged back in mid-January, at which time the Department for Education was preparing to evaluate each project under a range of criteria such as value for money, affordability and strategic policy and priority alignment.

The “sizeable submission” was made under the College of the Future Major Projects Fund and covered a range of different options with costings, architectural considerations and economic and carbon emissions/climate action appraisals for each.

That CMETB's project for Cavan is now one of 10 vying for seniority came as a surprise to ETB board member, Fianna Fáil's Clifford Kelly.

Addressing the meeting of board members, which took place in Monaghan last week, Cllr Kelly expressed his understanding that Cavan, along with a similar-type project for Meath, were to be the “first projects” sanctioned, and therefore “prioritised”.

“We now seem to be in a situation where we're competing with 10 other ETBs. It's not what we were told before,” said Cllr Kelly referring to perceived commitments given to the CMETB by former Minister for Further and Higher Education, and now Taoiseach, Simon Harris.

When Minister Harris spoke at the cutting of a ribbon on a new modular facility at the former Dun ui Neill barracks site, it was a doubling down on comments he made when he visited the county in December 2022 highlighting that an investment of €40M was all but ringfenced.

The project envisages a state-of-the-art campus to serve 1,000 students by building a new centralised FET provision for Cavan Institute.

Linda Pinkster, Director of FET at CMETB responded.

She said the Cavan college application was part of the “same process” as the nine other ETB projects from around the country.

She said “new processes” were presented to the local ETB as part of the Preliminary Business Case phase. ETBs were told to “reach for the stars”.

Ultimately, she said the Department and SOLAS will examine each application, and the next step will be for the invited ETBs to give a “presentation” to officials as part of that.

Cllr Kelly described it as a possible “setback”.

“We might have to take other action,” he warned.