Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

I actually said there is value for money. We need to work more on the nature of the scheme. As Deputy Carthy said, this has been a challenging year. We learned of a change of medical advice around post-primary school transport the week before children returned to school. Bus Éireann has jumped in to try to sort that out and has been working with us to try to sort that out. We have secured Government approval to move towards 50% transport. We are on a journey towards ensuring that 50% transport is put in place on second level school transport. We have it for nearly all of the special education children on second level school transport and we are working our way through it. There has been a real challenge for everybody in doing that. I would not use this year's challenge to fault Bus Éireann.

We are also working on improving our accountability relationship with Bus Éireann. The Comptroller and Auditor General had a report on this in 2018 and I was before this committee at that time working through those issues in detail. Since then, there have been a number of areas of detailed correspondence in that regard between me and this committee, particularly towards the end of 2019, around areas relating to value for money.