Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

First, I have to say that my family operates a school bus service and has for many years. All parents really depend on school bus transport to take their children to school. Practically all parents need their children to be taken to school safely. Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Governments promised that when the outlying school would be closed down, the schoolchildren would be bussed to the central school. Even last year, the Minister promised that all children would get free travel to school. She has gone back on that. If a child needs to go to school, there has to be ten children to start up a new run. That is not fair either.

I want to thank our inspectors, especially Michael Tyther, Tim Collins and Brenda Kirby in our local office school bus section, who have done tremendous work with limited resources. This over-70 rule is absolutely ridiculous. I have been raising it for three or four years now. All I am asking is that these excellent drivers be allowed drive once they present for a medical that is ordained by Bus Éireann. Bus Éireann is the only organisation that is preventing them from driving. They can drive the Local Link bus, they can take children on school bus tours organised by the school, the very same children they cannot bring to school.

I also have to say this. We need to treat our own Irish schoolgoing children the same as all the other children who have come into the country. While we welcome all those other children, there is an anomaly there. If you are inside the 2-mile limit you will not get what is known as a concessionary ticket but that does not apply to new children who come in. We have two sets of rules around Killarney and around many of our towns and villages whereby the new children who come in are bussed and it is organised for them but our own local children, whose parents went to the same school, cannot get that facility.

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