Ms Sarah Heneghan:

Late applications are only looked at when all of the on-time, eligible and concessionary pupils have been facilitated. There will be another batch of late applicants that will be examined by Bus Éireann to see if it can facilitate them on its services. The size of the service will be contracted on the basis of the number of eligible pupils who have applied and paid on time. Those 10,000 eligible pupils who have not applied and paid on time will have a knock-on effect on the size of the service. We cannot say that those 10,000 pupils will be accommodated because the same number of pupils were accommodated last year.