Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am sure the Deputy is aware these changes arise from a value for money report initiated under the previous Minister. The conclusions of that report, which were found to be sane and rational, are now being implemented. The overarching conclusion was that the State should provide transport for children to the school that is nearest to their home, which, irrationally, had not been the case. We are now at a point where, for the foreseeable future, we will provide transport to the school nearest to the home.

When we came to implement the measure, we had to choose between being dogmatic and inflexible and saying to parents with children who were already in a school that was not their nearest school, that they should remove their child from that school, or whether to be flexible and allow them leave them in that school. We decided that if a child was already at a particular school, we would allow them complete their full education cycle in that school. That is how this anomalous transitionary phase has arisen, where older siblings are in one school and entitled to transport to that school, but younger siblings are not entitled to transport to that school.

The only concession we can make is to say to the incoming children that we will provide them with a concessionary seat on that bus if it is available, while that route continues to operate. Once the older children are through the school cycle, that opportunity will cease to exist. That route will cease to exist and a route which may already be in existence will be available to that family to the nearest school. That transition phase will take three to four years - it is already in place for one year - and these anomalous situations will arise. We do our best to accommodate the other siblings through the concessionary option.

Up until last year, a child in the primary system who was eligible for transport was paying €50 and a child who was ineligible but was accessing a concessionary seat was paying €200. We equalised those and made it €100 across the board, which has helped a lot of parents. It is because we have been flexible and as supportive as we can to parents during that transition phase that has caused those anomalies to arise. Once those children are worked out of the system, we will then have a very straightforward, very simple and very fair system whereby every child will be eligible for transport to their nearest school and children from families in receipt of a medical card will have their transport provided free of charge. That is a very substantial number of families at the moment.