Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We would love to know the figure because, although people will say it worked and led to efficiencies, it did not in many ways, if you ask me. There were three or four colossal public meetings in the local hall. We had 400 or 500 parents attending one of them. RTÉ was out. There were protests. The buses eventually ran like clockwork, but only after a lot of teething problems. It was no fault of the drivers or anything like that. It was just that so much had to be lined up. We were a week or two into the service being operational with meetings still going on about where the stops were going to be and whether there were signs for those stops. It was just chaotic. I would love to know what the cost was. The service did work eventually despite huge reservations in the area, but at what cost? I really would like that communicated to this committee. We often ask for information and get promises that the information will come, but very often it does not, so I would like that in the next few days, if it could be emailed to the committee at education@oireachtas.ie. Very simply, what is the figure? What was spent on that scheme was alarming.

I also want to ask about a pocket of south Clare. I am a Clare representative. I am very close to Limerick city; I am a puck of the ball from the city boundary. That whole area is under a sphere of influence wherein a lot of children will apply to Limerick secondary schools - I went to Ardscoil Rís - and some to Clare secondary schools. There is a whole catchment area of 20,000 or so people who apply to both areas. It is unique, although maybe it is starting to creep into other parts of the country where we have a common application system for secondary schools. People in sixth class in secondary school do not automatically go to their local schools; they fill in this big form - it is like applying to colleges - with their school of first choice, second choice and so on. They are told to mark the list the whole way down. I used to teach sixth class for many years. I used to put these forms in front of children. They used to go home with their parents and fill in school No. 1, school No. 2 and school No. 3 all the way down to No. 17. Sometimes, I saw it happen that children were allocated school No. 17, which could have been 18 km or 20 km from where they were living. That is how that works. It is problematic in its own right, but then the problem in the Department of education is that the officials are looking at that through a different lens and saying a child has passed over loads of schools that were perfectly fine and acceptable. What kind of congruence is there where one policy is telling people to pick schools Nos. 1 to 17 and the other policy is saying that children should be going to their local or second-nearest schools?