Christopher O'Sullivan (Cork South West, Fianna Fail)
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I appreciate the response and some of those words are encouraging. I am concerned that providers share concerns that the "stuff" is not there, or the buses simply are not there. That could prove to be a huge issue if we are looking at double the capacity. The idea of a bus escort is very welcome, but I reiterate that we need to plan for this now. If we stay on the current trajectory, the greater social distancing requirements may no longer be required and we may be able to accommodate more students but we have to keep the possibility of a second wave in the back of our minds. We need to plan for this and make sure we do not have a repeat of what happened in Ballineen and Enniskean in 2019 where so many children were left without places.

I will finish on something slightly unrelated to Covid. In the light of our climate action aims, targets and goals, this really is the route we need to go down with school transport. The more students we can provide for, the less traffic on our roads and the less risk of a repetition of the traffic congestion we saw last year in the town of Bandon.