Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State has been landed with duties which are not the responsibility of his Department. The Ministers are busy people.

Can the Minister of State please explain to me, in light of the huge uptake of free transport, which is a great thing in theory, what the Department of Education is doing about school transport in order to increase the number of available bus drivers? My parish lost a bus that has run for 50 years, a bus I took to school. Last Tuesday, over 37 families were left on the side of the road and have been left on the side of the road ever since. Nothing has happened to resolve the situation.

I spent the weekend trying to get a bus driver. I thought if I could find one, he or she could drive a bus, but that does not seem to have worked out yet. I spoke to the Bus Éireann school transport bus inspector for our region and gave her the mobile number of the driver I had contacted. I spoke to the contractors and gave them the number of the driver, but nothing has happened. There are a few issues.

While it is great to offer free school transport, it has led to chaotic situations whereby the children of people who have always paid for school transport are not getting bus tickets, while others who never paid for bus transport have received them. That is a good thing, but for people who have always paid for school transport to lose places on school buses is devastating. People have built such arrangements into their routines.

As parents, we all know that in rural areas the only chance of children getting to school is through school transport. There is no public bus service or Luas as there is in Dublin. Many families' plans and days revolve around children getting on a bus to go to school. This does not just affect people in Clare; parents have taken to the streets about this in other areas.

Did the Department think about this? If the number of buses and bus drivers available are not increased, yet the numbers availing of the service increased from 110,000 to 180,000 pupils overnight, of course there will be chaos. It is also unfair for children who always had a bus ticket to not get one this year. I am sure the Department did not set out to create this mess, but we are in a mess and it is taking a toll on all families and students.

In the case of the Inagh to Ennis bus route, the bus driver did not turn up. Parents were told he was ill and were not told when he would return. It turned out that he was moved to another area to fill a gap created by a driver who got sick. One route was prioritised over another. A group of 52 children were abandoned for the sake of another group because somebody got sick. I do not know whether the school transport section is paying contractors to treat students like that.

I do not know where the buck stops, but I want to highlight the fact that contractors have not been reliable in this instance. There was nothing wrong with the driver on the route; he was simply moved to another route. The students were shocked when they met him at school and he said he was sorry he had to leave them and felt bad but he was moved somewhere else.

It is ironic because I have asked for free school transport for years, but when it finally arrived it does not seem to be working. Perhaps Bus Éireann did not expect the uptake. Perhaps a lot of people applied for bus tickets which they are not using. We may need to examine whether parents applied for tickets because they were free and ask them if they need a bus ticket and allow somebody else to take the space instead. There are many facets to this. We cannot offer free school transport and not invest in more bus drivers and buses. What is the Department doing to increase the number of bus drivers? I understand it takes three months to become a bus driver and get a licence.Is the Department doing anything about that? Is it running training courses? If it is I would love to know about them because this is not just an Inagh to Ennis issue, this is happening all over Ireland. I would love to know what the Department is doing about it and what it is doing about sorting out this one particular route, from Inagh to Ennis for the pupils who have relied on this service for more than 50 years until last Tuesday. It is now nine days later and we still have no resolution.