James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their responses and I appreciate that they will come back to us in writing with details on particular queries. While I do not want to labour the point, we all raised the communications issue, which it is fair to say has improved, but it is still not where we would like it to be. It is better than last year, but that is not saying much.

I wish to finish on a positive note. I did not want to bring it up initially because I wanted to focus on the issues with the service, which are extremely important to our constituents. I attended the Young Scientist exhibition in the RDS earlier this year. In one of the projects, students from Maynooth community college in my constituency had researched school transport. I asked them to send me on the numbers and they stack up. The school transport scheme is normally viewed as an exceptional scheme to get students from rural out-of-the-way places to school as they may find it difficult otherwise.

They turned that on its head and asked if the school transport scheme could become the default for transport to school. Would students living two streets away from school still get the bus as much as they would if they lived two or five miles outside the town? They surveyed a number of obvious benefits to congestion and climate change that accrue from having fewer vehicles on the road. The same argument for adults to use public transport to get to work rather than individuals driving their cars can be made for schoolchildren. This is not just in the far-flung places but also in the towns.

It was an interesting observation and an interesting project. The statistics those second level students produced were very impressive and stood up to scrutiny. I do not expect the witnesses to come back with a comprehensive reply on that today. However, it should be put on the agenda in order that it could be considered as policy at some stage.