Micheál Carrigy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I support Senator Ahern's proposal to invite the Minister for Health, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, to the House. I ask the Deputy Leader to add the issue of the heel-prick test to the list of matters to be discussed with him. It is an issue I have raised a number of times in the context of spinal muscular atrophy. A very small amount of money would be needed every year to prevent children from suffering so much.

Yesterday an announcement was made regarding school transport fees for the next school year. The scheme will open for applications on 1 March. A review of school transport started in February 2021 but we still have not seen the results of that review. That review should be published. We do not want to be in a situation next August where children are left on the side of the road. What happened last year is not acceptable. There was goodwill with regard to the provision of free transport but we ended up leaving a lot of children with no transport at all. A significant number of families had to pay for private transport at a cost of between €500 and €1,000, while others had free transport. This is an issue that needs to be addressed now. We need to get that review published so we do not repeat the mistakes that we made last year.

We all have text alerts in our local communities. My own local authority has now amalgamated them all into an app, in co-operation with local gardaí, so that messages go out directly to every single group in the county. However, we do not have a national warning system. Ciara, an intern who works in my office, did some research and found that Luxembourg has a national system of warnings, including weather warnings and so on. We issue such warnings through newspapers here but we do not use the technology that is out there. In Luxembourg it works through the phone providers in the country. If a warning issues regarding weather and so forth, it can be regionalised or sent nationally through the existing phone providers. It is something we need to look at. The system in Luxembourg is called GouvAlert