Malcolm Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State and appreciate that he is simply taking this Commencement matter on behalf of the Department of Education, but I refer him to the answer I received regarding this issue six months ago. Except for two or three lines, this response is a cut-and-paste of that answer from the Department. Basically, in terms of the pilot, the only thing the Department has announced is that the north County Wexford scheme is now included. The other two pilot schemes are not really new bus services. They are using the existing public transport network.

If pilot schemes are being introduced and reviewed for the 2024-25 school year, and this was committed to under the school transport 2030 review, my problem is that we do not have them in operation yet. I must question what the point is in sanctioning a scheme if we do have it up and operating. Looking at the response from the Department, my problem is that it is practically a cut-and-paste of the exact same answer I got six months ago.

The Minister of State will appreciate that I fully understand, as he does, how the school transport scheme operates. This was not the question I was asking. I asked the Department when the pilot schemes were going to start and where they were going to be operating.