The Shaws Road Irish Language Medium School was the first such school to be established in Belfast.

Surrounded by the back gardens of houses and apartments the ground rises 6 metres from school entrance to rear boundary.

The proposal is a simple double loaded, top-lit, central resource teaching area which cranks its way along the site. The centrally lit deep plan arrangement gives passive heat gain, stack ventilation, and good secondary lighting through glazed screens to the classrooms. The cranked plan concertinas the length of the building on the constrained site but also breaks the linear form into junior, middle and senior schools around the resource areas, whilst the roof section resolves these plan irregularities into a continuous ridge line.

The classrooms which form the main body of the school end with large blank gables, canted and zig-zagged they follow the plan form and roof section resulting in large angled expanses of walling on which the sun can cast its daily routine.

The school hall is located close to the main entrance to facilitate community use and to create an external courtyard space as threshold to the school.

The construction is seen as a background learning experience where large abstract forms can be perceived and the pragmatics of steel beams, padstones and junctions are also evident. School as place other than home, as an introduction to society, and the world at large.  The landscape setting with its framed views of the mountains and city reinforce this aspiration of understanding of one's place.

The floor level is lifted 1.8m above existing level to raise the body and head of the school to look over suburbs to the city beyond - a gesture of confidence that the Irish Language Community is a vibrant part of the life and culture of the city.

Bunscoil Phobal Feirste is 1,800 square metres in area and was completed in June 2000.