Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick East, Labour)

I agree with Deputy Cregan on the safety matter. I welcome the Minister of State. That representatives from three different parties have raised this matter indicates its importance. If we were not here we would be at a meeting in Ballybrown GAA club to discuss the matter. We have attended such meetings each Wednesday in recent weeks. I agree with Deputy Cregan that we need to resolve the issue through dialogue. However, the parents who enrolled their children in Pallaskenry believed that the status quo would remain because of the letter sent out in 2001 when the Minister for Defence, Deputy O'Dea, was the Minister of State with responsibility for school transport.

In May I received a reply to a parliamentary question which indicated no decision had been made and that it would be decided in the context of the school places issue in Limerick city. That issue is central in that insufficient places exist on that side of the city. While it can be said that places exist in Limerick city, there is no logic in parents having to send their children to the other side of the city when they could be sent a few miles out the road to Pallaskenry, which is their choice of school. There is not availability in terms of the choices parents made last year and the previous year. More than 50% of the children at school in Pallaskenry are from outside the catchment area.

In my role as education spokesperson, I am aware of what goes on in other parts of the country. Extra buses have been provided in these cases and children outside catchment boundaries, in some cases in numbers as large as those involved in Pallaskenry, have been facilitated in recent weeks. I ask the Minister of State to re-open this issue because there has been a suggestion that somehow it has been decided and cannot be re-opened. In the interests of parents it must be re-opened. The Minister of State should listen to some of the stories we have heard about parents who were losing earnings, who were trying to return from night work and get their children to school, and who are now car-pooling. They cannot go on like this much longer. They are determined to send their children to the Salesian college in Pallaskenry and they know they cannot get their children into city schools. They were not able to do so in the past year. I dealt with many parents who now have their children in the Salesian college in Pallaskenry who had nowhere to send their children in the city.

This is an issue of catchment as well as one about not having sufficient places in the city catchment. The Minister of State must find a resolution in the context of that overall situation. This is not simply a matter of the children being able to go to school within their own catchment area. The demographics have changed greatly in the Limerick area since 1967, when the boundaries were drawn up. The city has extended greatly on the western side in areas such as Raheen, Mungret and Clarinagh. All children in those areas are outside the catchment area for Pallaskenry. They are in the city catchment, but there is no logic in their parents having to drive right across the city traffic to the other side of Limerick if they could have a school bus which would bring them to the Salesian college in Pallaskenry. For many reasons, that makes much more sense. I ask the Minister of State to please resolve this issue.

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