Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I find it remarkable in this day and age that we have a system whereby every year there is a scramble to find places on school buses and elected representatives of this House and on the local authorities across our country are contacted by concerned parents in their thousands, parents who are rightly worried about how their children will get to school in the upcoming year. It really is not a good system and it is flawed.

The fundamental flaw, in my view, is that responsibility for the system sits in the Department of Education rather than the Department of Transport. I agree with Deputy Nash, who spoke earlier, that the review must be published as soon as possible. The Minister made a point in her opening speech about how thorough, wide-ranging, comprehensive and inclusive the review of school transport has been. From listening to her opening remarks, however, there is a glaring blind spot there. She stresses how there has been consultation with people who would like to use the scheme. This really is not good enough. The bounds of the scheme should not be those who might like to use it. School transport must be considered in the wider realm of public transport. It is providing public transport for young people but it should not be exclusively so. The fact that we have a public transport system and a parallel school transport system run by two different Departments, whereby the users of one system cannot access the other, is not just inefficient but also is ripe for the kinds of anomalies and issues we have seen over the years. That the school transport system sits outside a multimodal system is nonsensical, not only in the context of other people who should be able to use the bus, train or shared services, including teachers, but also because services can continue on to serve hospitals and amenities. It is woefully inefficient. We will see what the review says but it really does not make sense that we have these two parallel systems. It is ripe for the kinds of issues that we have seen and continue to see and that are causing immense stress for parents across the country. Ever since the terms of the scheme were introduced in 2012, there have been problems. They have been rectified in a very ad hocand reactionary basis. There is a need for a complete overhaul of the scheme. This is public transport and it should lie with the public transport authorities. The Department of Transport should be the lead Department, working, of course, with the Department of Education.

Expanding the scheme would have a number of benefits. If we start to look at it in a holistic way, it is not just about considering those who might like to use it. Considering how many children are driven to school, perhaps quite happily, by their parents, we should target them for the school bus system, rather than having a situation whereby so many kilometres are being driven by parents, contributing immensely to the carbon emissions in the transport sector. We have to reduce those transport emissions by 50% based on 2018 levels. We therefore cannot just look at this as a system that is for those who have no alternative; we have to look at it as a system that is an alternative for children being driven to school. I am extremely concerned that the review has a blind spot towards that, and I ask the Minister to look at that carefully. If we maintain two parallel systems whereby users of one cannot use the other, we are failing.

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