Mark Wall (Kildare South, Labour)

I thank Deputy Eoghan Kenny for affording me the opportunity to raise a number of matters. I welcome that the Minister of State is before us this evening. Like many Deputies here today, I have been inundated with queries from worried parents who are struggling to get answers from Bus Éireann on their children's school bus places. In many cases, parents were contacted a week or two before the start of the school term, and in a number of cases in my own county of Kildare two days before the school was due to start, and were informed that their school bus routes were not going ahead. This is despite the fact that many of these parents already had a school bus ticket in their possession. The question has already been posed, but I will pose it again. How can Bus Éireann issue a ticket for a bus that does not exist? Who is controlling the ghost buses? In many cases I have been told by Bus Éireann and the Minister of State's office that it came down to finding suitable contractors.

Yet, when I rang some of the contractors, whom I know and have worked with on many occasions, they told me they were actually waiting on Bus Éireann to sign the contract and not the other way around. That is the case for more than one route in Kildare. I am sure other colleagues in the House will have had the same experience.

While this is happening year in, year out, this year was particularly bad. Every year since I have been a public representative, school transport has been an issue. We have been promised reports and solutions but, unfortunately, this year has been the worst year I have ever had with school transport. I have been inundated with worried parents and, as has been continuously said here tonight, parents who have had to take time off work and unpaid holiday leave to get their children to school. It is simply not good enough.

I did not pick up at all the communications problems I and other public representatives have had with Bus Éireann in the Minister of State’s speech. It is simply not good enough that I have been asked to submit emails, with consent from parents, and yet, as I stand in front of the Minister of State today, I still have not received those replies. We need a dedicated line for Oireachtas Members. We need to have a line that will provide us with answers straight away, such as the line we have in the Passport Office. I refer to a line we could ring to give the details and get an answer as to what is actually happening, rather than waiting three to four months for a reply. As I said, in some cases, a reply has still not been forthcoming.

The Minister of State will know I am going to raise the issue of the Curragh secondary school with him once again. I have raised this as a Topical Issue, as well as with the Minister of State on a number of occasions. Some 29 to 40 children are using their parents’ cars, carpooling where they can, to get to a school on the Curragh. They are waiting for a new school to be built in Kildare town, but we still do not have a bus for them.

In the short time I have remaining, I wish to raise the issue of drivers over the age of 70 not being allowed to drive Bus Éireann buses. It seems madness that these same drivers can come in on a private bus and take those children to far-flung places, such as Donegal or Cork, without a problem yet they cannot drive 5 miles from their home into the school. What is wrong there?

Special schools have already been mentioned. I have raised this before and I will finish on this point. We have people in school buses and special taxis criss-crossing one another as they go from Athy, where I live, to Dublin and as people from Dublin bypass Athy on their way back to Kilkenny. It is about joined-up thinking. While I know the Minister of State is doing his best, we need more action. We need that joined-up thinking because too many families are suffering.

See this speech in context