Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister has answered some of the questions I had. I want to ask him especially about the special needs children and the Down's syndrome children. They have been left out. After the July provision, there is uncertainty and people do not know. I could mention class sizes and the figure the Government quotes. I have a granddaughter in a classroom of 34 students to one teacher. They are the real figures behind what is going on. Boards of management and principals are under enormous pressure. There is another cohort that I worry about greatly, namely the school bus tickets. We have bedlam every year. The Minister of State, Mr. John Halligan, was dealing with it last year and there was absolute bedlam. This year a strong cohort of the bus operators are private operators who are not contracted to Bus Éireann and now they are out there penniless. They have to maintain their buses. They have to do the DoE test, have them insured and get all the different certifications and they are willing to do that. They have not got a cent. Thankfully the operators with Bus Éireann are getting 50% of payments but these people are being discriminated against. What is going on is deplorable and nobody is taking any interest, neither the Minister, Mr. Ross, nor the Minister, Deputy McHugh. Someone needs to grasp that because if they do not have those buses in September to bring children back to school, there will be a further problem.

I salute the staff in SUSI. Ger in my office deals with them a lot. They are working very hard. We had serious issues with SUSI when it came out first a number of years ago but it has been streamlined. Deputy O'Donoghue is right about the guidelines on the distance of 45 km. The way it is worked out you would think they were flying to school. They have to go around roads, avoid traffic and whatever. Surely there must be flexibility, not a huge amount but a little flexibility that they can avoid certain roads. We do not have the roads that Eamon Ryan has around Dublin or the network of buses and DART and everything else. If he has his way we will not have them either. If Fine Gael has its way with him, we will not have them either.

Those issues are very concerning, particularly in respect of special needs. We need clarity. I refer to the students unions and indeed the secondary schools. I praise Ciara Fanning, a girl from my own county who is doing great work. The Minister mentioned that there is a meeting of stakeholders tomorrow. They are finding that when they have a meeting with the Minister, announcements are made before the meetings are over. It is only tokenism that is being shown to them and that is not fair. Ní neart go cur le chéile. Everybody needs to be supported in this and everybody is doing their best.

The other issue is this. Many communities have excellent community centres now. Some schools have gone ahead and organised these themselves. There should be some programme or incentive put out by the Minister for the finest of the community centres that are out there put there by the people, the enablers of the communities as I call them. Many of them got grants from the State and manage the upkeep themselves. Those fabulous community halls need to be used. They could have been used for the exams too, if there had been a bit of intrigue and intuition in the Department, a bit of planning. The Department is stale and the officials are just stuck in pigeon holes and cannot think outside the box. That is what was wrong. The Department mandarins will love this new Government because we will have Ministers changing every couple of months and they will love that situation.

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