John Halligan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have dealt with the Deputy on a number of occasions when he was rightly representing his constituency. The difficulty we have all experienced, and that I have experienced since coming into this office, is the criteria laid down for the school transport scheme in legislation. Every child with special needs can avail of school transport or a payment. A special payment is made if a bus was not near the area. he difficulty we have is with concessionaries. The scheme initially was never set out for concessionaires. It was set out for eligible children. I will explain this with an example. If we had a bus with 20 seats to take 16 people from a particular place to their nearest school, rather than leave the bus with four empty seats, we would fill that bus with concessionaries. Difficulties then arose. It became complex in the sense that once that bus had those 20 people - 16 eligible and four concessionaries - if an eligible child needed to use that bus we were obliged to make sure that child got transport on the bus. The difficulty that has arisen since the school transport scheme was put in place and since we agreed to carry concessionaries is that there has been a dramatic increase in concessionaries from about 2,500 to well over 20,000 at this stage. Financially, we do not have the wherewithal. Concessionaries and eligible children increase in number every year. The number of children with special needs increases every year.

We are obliged to carry every eligible child and every child that has special needs within the budget and the criteria laid down. We are not obliged to carry concessionary children. I may be wrong, but the three children the Deputy is talking about could be concessionaries. I will look into the Deputy's case. That is the difficulty with the scheme. We are doing 100 million kilometres annually. It is a complex detailed scheme. There are 11,000 children with special needs and 4,500 vehicles in use daily. We run into difficulties.

The second issue is the distance and geographical way to a school. I am not in a position to determine that. It has to be determined by Bus Éireann, which transverses the route. We allow Bus Éireann to do that rather than the Minister or officials from the Department because we are not qualified to do that. It can be complex and difficult and there can be issues in areas. What we try to do is to meet every person, Minister and public representative who has an issue. The officials do their best to meet them. We have not failed to meet a public representative yet. I have travelled to different parts of the country to meet public representatives if they cannot travel to me. I do not like the idea of children not being able to get to school. We do everything in our power. The officials, to be fair to them, try to tweak and twist the scheme as much as possible within the legislation and the criteria laid down. We have difficulties with concessionaries and we will have into the future. They are not eligible for the school transport scheme. However, we can talk to the Deputy about his issue. That is no problem at all.