Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This school transport issue goes back some time. In fact, I remember the first school I started in was a little parish school in Carrigallen. Then, it was centralised into the central school in the parish. The smaller schools that people could walk to closed and the deal was that everybody would be bussed to the central school in the parish. That is how it happened across all of rural Ireland when that programme was put in place in the mid-70s. It worked very well until 2012 when the report came out, which I believe was produced by the then Minister, Mary Coughlan. That is when we developed this notion of some children being a concession and others being entitled. The very terminology gets under my skin.

We must recognise that as part of a free education process, every child is, and should be, entitled to a reasonable school transport service wherever he or she lives in the nation. That is what we should work towards. That particular scheme introduced that, however, and it introduced a whole range of other provisions that have caused endless problems, including the numbers of children that had to be on a route and the distance they had to be from a school. They are just endless. We all have people and families contacting us, including many in my constituency. I know of three children in one family who travel on the bus, one of whom gets a ticket. The other two children cannot go on the bus. They do not have tickets because they are concessionary. This notion is driving people insane. The reality is that Government needs to get to grips with it and come up with a solution that works for everyone.

I am aware of numerous situations. In fact, the parents of a child with special needs contacted me recently. The child lives in County Leitrim and has not been able to go to school in County Roscommon. A taxi service is being put in place now. I spoke to the organiser only today. They finally got the service in place, but now the school has to try to find an escort to go with that child. These difficulties and problems are being worked out logically by people on the ground. Sometimes, when Members come in here, I am amazed by the common sense I hear from Government and Opposition spokespeople and backbenchers about how we can try to find a solution to these issues and all work together to get them sorted out, but it never seems to get any further than this Chamber. It is dead when it leaves here. Nobody is prepared to apply common sense and a sense of delivery for people after that. Indeed, when it comes to our own representations, when we ring the Oireachtas representatives' line for Bus Éireann, we cannot get a response or any sense of a service from it either. That is one issue the Minister of State needs to examine. At the end of the day, however, until Government gets to grips with this and delivers equality for all children, we are in trouble.

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