Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail)
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I was thinking about where we have capacity issues in larger cities. We have a housing crisis. It is replicated in urban centres around the country. Mr. Ó Foghlú will know from parliamentary questions and representations we make to him about the smaller schools that are under pressure, where every year there is a child whose brother has a place on the school bus who cannot get one because there is a new way of measuring the route to the school which means it is not the closest school or whatever.

Bearing in mind the difficulties we have in many urban centres and in Dublin, and while there are always pressures to build new schools - I am aware of two new schools in Harold's Cross - has there been any cross-departmental analysis of the introduction of a more proactive transport scheme to try to encourage the repopulation of rural schools? Using transport as a tool might be of assistance in terms of housing and pressures in many of the urban centres. For example, school X with its facilities and infrastructure in a rural area could be built up to a viable number of students, which, in turn, would take pressure off the urban difficulties we are having in abundance throughout the country. Has any such analysis been conducted? Is there an aversion to examining something like that? I am guessing there has been no such analysis due to all of the other pressures on the Departments