Sorca Clarke (Longford-Westmeath, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We spoke about affordability and availability. I want to return to the accessibility part, particularly outside our major cities. If we are looking at a five-year plan, if we want to be able to give parents certainty and if we are committing to a vision of where we want to be a number of years hence, one of the biggest issues in terms of accessibility is how the child physically gets from the school to the after-school place. The Chair touched on this earlier. Would there be merit in extending the school transport scheme to include not just the child's primary residence, and the criteria that are there are very limited, but also where the child goes to after school, if only for that single journey from the school to the aftercare providers and perhaps not necessarily home if the parent is going to be collecting? It is simply to get the child from the school to the after-school place because otherwise it is not going to be physically possible. My constituency is Longford-Westmeath. There are plenty of parents who live in Longford and work in Athlone or who live in Athlone and work in Mullingar. That is a 45-minute to an hour journey and there is simply no way that a parent is going to be able to get from a school gate to an aftercare provider and then back to work within a lunch hour. The witnesses' opinion on that would be much appreciated.