Ambitious £36m plans for new Cookstown school approved by Assembly

After years of intense lobbying and frustrating delays, a business case for the new Holy Trinity College building was finally approved this week by the Department of Finance.

Proposals to replace the existing school, which has been in need of new facilities for at least two decades, with a state-of-the-art new development have been dogged with setbacks.

Plans were temporarily mothballed in 2010 due to severe budgetary constraints on the Department of Education.

At the time, Education Minister Catriona Ruane said the new school might win approval after more work on its plans. However, there was no guarantee it would be built because she said there was not enough money.

Three years later, after intense lobbying, Ruane’s replacement as Education Minister, John O’Dowd announced that the new school would be built as one of 22 new build projects in a £220 million investment across the province.

He said the projects were aimed at either addressing “serious or substandard accommodation inadequacies”, or at effecting agreed rationalisation of the schools estate. Work was hoped to begin on the co-educational 1,300 pupil all-ability school in 2014.

SDLP MLA Patsy McGlone, who has been campaigning for a new school for the past twenty years has raised the issue several times at the Northern Ireland Assembly. He warned that the existing building was ‘totally unacceptable’.