Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I agree with Deputy O'Rourke. I hope we can sort that issue in Stamullen. It is the Department of Education and Bus Éireann that can deal with it in the short run. I agree with Deputy O'Rourke. Last year we sat down with the Department of Education to review the school public transport system. I strongly advocated for greater integration between scheduled public services and the school transport system for exactly the same reasons Deputy O'Rourke has cited. We agreed in principle and we agreed to introduce some pilot projects this September to see how it would work. I do not know whether they have been publicly announced yet but my recollection is that Roscommon and Limerick are two of the local areas where we will do this. There is a need to test them to ensure child safety and how they would work. The principle already works in urban areas. In Dublin schoolchildren on the bus get scheduled services. It is not as if it would be something completely different.

The benefit of this would be twofold. Many school buses tend to be older buses. They are run for perhaps 250 days a year so, therefore, the economics of getting a new bus is trickier. A scheduled service runs for 365 days a year, which helps to get newer fleet. To go back to Connecting Ireland services, there might be five, three or seven services a day but if school transport could be integrated it may allow the services to be ramped up to go from seven to nine services or from three to five services. In a sense, additional services can be added by doing it this way.

Often the numbers are difficult. There is an issue with whether there are enough people to justify a school bus. There are fewer of these problems when joining schools to scheduled services. We will start piloting this in September. If it proves successful we should look at widespread deployment of the idea. The national investment framework for transport in Ireland states that one of the first things we will do is use existing assets, rather than always having to build new, and this is an example. By integrating the two we get efficiencies in both which benefit school transport and local link services.