Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have the final speaking slot. I have three minutes. I wish to return to Sixmilebridge and the pilot scheme there. While it may seem parochial, it is not. Everyone in here needs to be tuned into this pilot scheme because it could be somewhere else in the country next. I have asked for the costs of the scheme. After posing all of those questions, the response I will get will outline extra costs of €40,000 or whatever but state that it was a success. When the witnesses report back to the committee on this, I really want them to elaborate on this scheme. The manpower involved was huge. I know they will say that those workers were all on the payroll anyway and that HR inputs cannot be quantified. I get that. I ask them to please elaborate a little bit on that scheme when they report back to the committee.

I refer to the number of people from the Department and from Bus Éireann and the number of contractors who were on site morning and afternoon, some of whom rode on the buses to supervise how they were driving while others were at the stops and the pick-up points. There were Zoom meetings at night. It was crazy. If this is to be replicated throughout the country, it is just not sustainable for the witnesses and the organisations they represent. With the new Minister in the Department of Education and Youth, Deputy McEntee, as well as the Minister of State, Deputy Moynihan, I am sure the witnesses will have to go in to report to them. While on one metric they can say the scheme works because people are being picked up and brought to school on time, it is everything else. At the end of the day, we are lawmakers and policymakers and we manage the public purse to some degree. There must be some scrutiny at this committee. I would love the witnesses to encapsulate the scheme, warts and all. We know the eventual outcome was successful, but collecting and dropping off is just one lens to look at this. In my eyes, it was everything else that did not work. I can say no more on it other than to ask the witnesses to report back on it. The Minister cannot simply be told that the scheme was a success when the cost of it was colossal.

To make a final point, I mentioned earlier that innovative ways of transforming school transport are being looked at. It is a fact – I have made this point repeatedly over the years – that in any town or city in Ireland, you can get from A to B today with relative ease because the schools are closed and 1.5 million children are not being brought to the school gate and hugged in the queue. We are all guilty of it at some point in our life. School transport, when done right, really works and unlocks so many other things. The more money thrown behind this, the better. We are not really having that lightbulb moment unless we are dealing with school transport. We can talk about EV charging points and all sorts of new fandangle transport and everything in between, but unless we are somehow taking all these cars off the road and having that July and August experience of traffic every month of the year, we are not going to get to the bottom of it. Sometimes, the joined-up thinking does not happen.

My last question is to Mr. Kent. There is a school bus that goes out every morning to Parteen National School in County Clare from the Limerick depot. It is a Bus Éireann bus. It comes out full of children, drops them off at the school gate and leaves that village. Having fulfilled its contract to the Department of education, it turns around and goes back to the Bus Éireann depot again. It leaves empty. All the people of the village are saying that it would be lovely to get the bus and go into Limerick city, but they cannot because that bus is on a Department of education contract on the way out and becomes a Bus Éireann bus on the way back in. There must be some joined-up way to say that when the bus turns around, it can pick people up in that village at 9.05 a.m. and bring them into Limerick. That joined-up thinking is not there, however. Maybe Mr. Kent can join up that thinking for us today.