Áilín Quinlan: What a dog’s dinner... school meals scheme doomed to fail

All this fandangle over hot school meals. It’s giving me a pain.

There were always going to be problems with the Hot School Meals Programme.

The intentions were good, but you know the one about good intentions and the road to hell, don’t you?

And hell is where all of this is leading, if you ask me.

If I had children of primary school age, I’d be back making their lunches after what’s been reported about the school dinners programme recently.

Why did the government have to complicate things by even getting involved in this in the first place?

Nobody, to my recollection, ever jumped up and down demanding that hot meals be cooked and delivered to primary school classrooms.

The concept was introduced by the Minister for Social Protection, Regina Doherty, six or seven years ago as a pilot scheme in a relatively small number of DEIS (designated disadvantaged schools) to ensure that the children in these areas had a daily nutritious hot meal.

Not a bit wrong with that. The project was addressing a real need, and had a clear mission, and by all accounts was quite successful.

Here’s a thought, though: if the government wanted to expand it, maybe it should have used the money to ensure that every child in every DEIS school in the country got a good, healthy, hot meal in the middle of the day.

And left it at that.

But oh no, some bright spark decided it would be a great idea to start delivering hot dinners across the primary school network without (it seems to me) the necessary planning, sufficient resources or, dear God, the merest smidgen of oversight.

Did they have any idea how much hard work and money actually goes into providing genuinely good food? If you ask me, some think-tank consultant woke up one morning with the idea that delivering hot meals to every school would make for Really Super Optics.

But the optics are not super; far from it.

The Hot School Meals Programme is fast turning into the biggest can of worms you ever saw in your life.

Anyone who watched Jamie Oliver struggling to sort out the school dinners fiasco in the UK, oh it must be nearly 20 years ago now, would have guessed the same thing would likely happen here if we tried it.

But the Irish government had to be seen to keep up with the Joneses, even after what happened in the UK, so in comes this programme which will cost, we’re told, in the region of nearly €300 million this year.

A scheme under which, metaphorically speaking, so little margarine is being stretched so thinly and across so much bread, that hard-pressed suppliers are being paid only €3.20 per head to provide healthy nutritious, hygienically packed, delivered meals.

Given the cost of basic food, not to mention the labour and fuel costs involved in this scheme, €3.20 a head is not, in my humble opinion, nearly enough to pay for this.

Ironically, this is the government which wasted €336,000 on a bike shed, €1.4million on a security hut, €9 million on school phone pouches, and oversaw a €2.2 billion overspend on the National Children’s Hospital.

Now we’re hearing allegations that the quality of some of the food is poor. That some meals have been compared to “airline food”.

Dara Calleary, the minister for social protection, said at least one-third of the hot school meals on offer did not meet at least three basic nutritional standards.

A recent assessment also signalled concerns regarding low fruit, vegetable and salad content.

Michael Collins, the Cork TD and leader of Independent Ireland, bluntly described some images of school meals sent to him by parents as “revolting”.

I’m no logistics expert, but I’m shopping for, cooking and serving food all my life, and in truth I’d be blown away if suppliers, no matter how well-intentioned, hard-working and efficient, were managing to cook, package and transport delicious food of home-cooked quality to the eligible half a million schoolchildren for €3.20 a head and still make a reasonable profit.

There have already been warnings that the Hot School Meals Programme is resulting in substantial amounts of waste. That portion sizes are not always appropriate for the different age-groups, so some children are getting too much and others not enough.

Not to mention, of course, the massive administrative burden that this great new initiative is placing on the primary school sector.

If you ask me, whoever came up with the programme:

(a) never prepared a high-quality, nutritious, home-cooked meal to a tight budget in his or her life,

(b) never went to the supermarket with a budget grocery list of healthy foodstuffs for a family

(c) is wearing the biggest, thickest pair of rose-tinted sunglasses ever manufactured.

And now things are not working out the way they were envisaged.

Realistically, how could they?

If I was the government, this is a hole I’d rapidly stop digging for myself.

I’d tell most parents to dig out the lunch-boxes again, and I’d target the hot school dinners programme at Deis schools only.

I’d use the funding to provide genuinely, consistently high quality, nutritional breakfasts AND dinners for the children in this country who need it most.

I’d make sure the quality of this food was rigorously, regularly and randomly monitored.

And I’d leave it at that.