Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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I know the Minister will agree that such situations are not acceptable.

Do we understand from the figures that fees will be in reintroduced next year for the applications that will open in springtime? I urge the Minister to make free school transport permanent because of the economic cost for parents, but also because of climate change and the need to reduce emissions. Free school transport makes sense in so many ways.

I also flag to the Minister that many people are attending a local school but it is not their closest school, and in rural Ireland, we do not have the choice of subjects. For example, we want to encourage more students to take up physics, so if it is not available at their nearest school but is available at another school that is farther way, we should incentivise that by enabling school transport. I ask the Minister to make things as flexible as possible in the review. People will not exploit the situation. School transport feeds into our workforce planning and the educational pathways we are enabling our students to follow. It is an integral part of that.