Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)

The issue of school transport is an annual upheaval we have across the country. As long as I have been here, this problem has come up every September. There is a particular route somewhere that was perfect last year and now it has changed because there are two fewer children on it and the bus has been withdrawn completely, or there is some other place where people thought they had enough children to get on the bus and did not. We have situations where we have people who have concessionary tickets. I have a situation where there are three children on concessionary tickets. One of them got a ticket on the bus, but how are the other two going to get to school? There are all sorts of craziness surrounding all this.

In fairness, a review was done and there are recommendations. If those recommendations were implemented, we would go a considerable distance towards resolving many of these problems, yet the Government continues to sit on its hands and not implement the very recommendations of a report it commissioned. That is one of the key problems we have here.

We also have the serious issue of parents trying to get to special classes in schools. The Minister of State is well aware of it. They are crisscrossing the country, over and back. A child from one parish cannot get into the special class in his or her school because it is full and the child then has to go ten, 15, 20 or maybe 30 miles away to get a class. The following year, a child from the parish the first child is going to now has a space opened up in the other one. We have this thing of children being taxied all over the place at a very high cost to the State because the Government has not enough provision of classes for autism, particularly, in many of these schools. We also have a situation with special schools. There are special schools in many of our areas, but in County Leitrim we do not have one at all and that is a problem. Children are leaving the county to go to Roscommon, Cavan and Longford. That needs to be resolved.

The solutions are there for the problem with school transport, yet the Government, for whatever reason, seems to not want to implement its own report. We can come here and discuss all this annually and come back to the same problem, but we need action and that action will require a small piece of investment compared with the big problem we have got. I ask the Minister of State to ensure that report is implemented.

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