Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I know it is under assessment, as I have kicked up blue bloody murder to have it assessed. It is only a matter of time. One would want to see it to believe it. It is a main stretch of the N25, a single carriageway with a hard shoulder on either side. The cars do not have any place to pull up. There is a small privately owned car park. Many of the cars are pulling up on the hard shoulders and the buses have to pull in. The three buses that arrived while I was there actually pulled into the turning lane, which leads to Ardmore. That is where they were setting the children down. It is on the right side of the road, so the situation is worse in the morning when the kids have to cross the road while cars are travelling at 100 km/h or more. Let us add the dark mornings into that and how the place is prone to fog.

The root problem is the nearest school eligibility criterion. The school transport review talks about doing away with it, so we can solve this by trying to get a head start. There are 34 kids coming out of Ardmore on a private bus at a cost of €40 per week, or €1,200 over the course of a school year, which is no joke. On the public bus are 40 more students from Ardmore village. A bus could be filled in Ardmore village and transport students straight into Dungarvan. There are 26 students who come from Grange. That is enough for a minibus. We could fill one up and let the pupils go straight in from there. There are nine students from in and around the Kiely’s Cross area and seven students from the Piltown-Clashmore area.

The solution is as obvious as the nose on your face. We can set a bus off from Ardmore, set another off from Grange and have an existing one at Kiely’s Cross with enough room in the car park to facilitate that safely. What is stopping us is the nearest school eligibility criterion. The buses are already there, so it is not about trying to add additional capacity. The drivers are happy to go from Grange or Ardmore. Let us not wait for a tragedy to arrive at a solution that is right there in front of our faces.

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