Cathy Bennett (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)

I disagree with Deputy Byrne. As far as I can see, school transport is getting worse every year. Every year I am contacted by parents whose children have been utterly failed by this Government. With little to no notice parents are left to shoulder the burden of attempting to reschedule work and other commitments to deal with the Government's failures while children see buses full of their schoolmates and classmates passing by their homes with no space for them. However, there are spaces. Tickets have been allocated to children who do not use the bus, so the spaces lie idle and other children who need the bus cannot avail of them. Families have endured three years of utter chaos while the Department has conducted a review into the school transport scheme, which was eventually published 19 months ago. A key recommendation of that report was that from September of this year, the nearest school criteria would be reduced, but that has not happened yet. We have seen a handful of pilot studies with no meaningful change. As a result, children across this State have been denied places on their local school bus.

This is a mess of the Minister's making. She has implemented a review and her response to the shambles that she is overseeing amounts to an excuse that contracts were cancelled at the last minute and a sop of throwing money at parents, by the way of an apology, to make alternative arrangements.

Why was such a volume of contracts cancelled at the last minute? Why is the Minister signing contracts to facilitate chaos? One potential reason that I have been informed of is that workers on these routes do not have good working conditions. For example, workers will lose wages on the day of the Presidential election because no children are going to school. Truthfully, there seems to be an issue within the Department of contracting workers on poorer terms than might be expected. The Department fosters financial uncertainty among workers.

Parents do not want compensation to make alternative arrangements. They want their Government and Ministers to do their jobs to ensure that every child is allocated a school seat on the bus. Please get your act together as soon as possible, and definitely before next year or we will go through this chaos again.

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