Labour's spokeswoman for Education, Jan O'Sullivan, has now called on the Minister for Education to revise the programme, Deis (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools), which was launched last May in an attempt to standardise resources for disadvantaged schools.

"I'd be totally against taking resources away from these schools, " O'Sullivan said.

The Deis scheme aims to standardise pupil-toteacher ratios. The Department of Education told the Sunday Tribune that under the scheme, St Michael's would "benefit from reduced class sizes of 20:1", but the school currently has a ratio of fewer than 10 children for every teacher. Were the school to remain open . . . an option the Christian Brothers said on Friday they would be "prepared to reconsider" . . . staff numbers at the school could be halved, making it impossible to run. Although the numbers attending the school are low . . . 66 in total . . . some of the children have been refused entry to other schools, and have special needs.

The Christian Brothers announced the closure last week and the school's trustees are due to meet Minister Hanafin next week. A spokeswoman for the Department of Education said the minister was "more anxious to have a phased closure rather than immediate closure."

Dwarfed by blocks of flats and divided by wasteland, St Michael's CBS, off Emmet Road in Inchicore, already looks closed. A thick black door locks the 66 boys inside its stone walls. Wire grids cover every window. The disused part of the school has been broken into and vandalised so many times that everyone seems to have lost count.

On Wednesday, principal Mary Frewan admitted the presence of TV cameras, reporters and protesters had taken its toll on the pupils. Two boys brawled through a back door from the yard into the hallway thumping each other. "I'm going home!" bellowed the older boy. "You can't go home, come back here, " Frewan said, exasperated. "F**k off. I'm going home, " the boy replied, storming towards the black door.

That afternoon, handwritten posters protesting the closure were already on the school's walls.

Parents, a teaching representative and the lord mayor of Dublin, Catherine Byrne, packed into the computer room. At the meeting, a committee was formed. They have one aim . . . to keep the school open.

"Basically, the only reason we were given was that because staffing levels are being cut the school couldn't operate, " parent Ros Ralph, who has a son in fourth class, said. "They're talking about the regeneration of St Michael's estate.

The TDs are saying there's money being pumped into houses, but without local amenities, what's the point? We don't want to live in an area full of apartment blocks."

In private, both parents and teachers wonder where these boys will go if the school closes. The consensus is, although many may register in other schools, the change won't be a successful one.

Some will fall into a cycle of long-term truancy and suspension. Staff at St Michael's have been subjected to physical attacks, verbal abuse and vandalism of property. In one incident, 3,000 worth of damage was caused to a staff member's car. The vandalism was linked to the suspension of a pupil for violent behaviour.

It was in St Michael's that some of the leaders of the 1916 Rising were accommodated before their executions. "This ideal from 1916 of cherishing children equally is a bit ironic now considering that St Michael's is where the leaders with those ideals spent their last hours and these are the children who perhaps need to be cherished the most, " O'Sullivan said.