Pauline Tully (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State, Deputy Moynihan, is welcome.

Every autumn, when students are about to back to school, any of us who live in rural areas are inundated with contact from parents distressed over the fact that their child has not got a school bus ticket for the coming school year. They are only notified of this within maybe a week or two of returning to school. It mostly applies to post-primary school but it can apply to primary school as well. It is based on the Department rules which set down that you have to live not less than 3.2 km from your local primary school or 4.8 km from your local secondary school, and be attending your nearest school to be deemed eligible and, therefore, get a school bus ticket.

I know that what are called temporary alleviation measures, which were drafted in 2019, introduced and have been in place since, allow students in second level schools to get a bus ticket to attend their second-nearest school. They do have to pay for it, even if they have a medical card, but at least they can get and are assured of a school bus ticket.It meant that all the other students there were waiting to see if there was space on the bus so that they could get a concessionary school place. This is very stressful for parents. For example, there are four schools in Cavan, two in Granard, one in Oldcastle, and they are all within a similar distance of each other from where I live. If my children were to attend any of those schools, they could be deemed to be the third or fourth nearest school, even though they are all a similar distance away. Last August, 18 students in my area who had bus tickets for a bus going to one of the schools in Cavan were told within two weeks of the beginning of the school year that they had no bus ticket. Some of them had bus tickets for four years and, suddenly, they were left without transport to school. This again was very stressful for parents. This meant that parents who were working and who had younger children that they had to get to crèche or primary school were scrambling for a number of weeks to try to get their children into school. It was resolved after some time but I do not know why it could not be resolved before they were due to go back to school.

In the meantime, a school transport review had been carried out. It was published around February last year. It made a number of recommendations, namely, to reduce the distance for primary school from 3.2 km to 2 km, and then to 1 km, and for post-primary to 2 km from 4.8 km. More importantly, it also recommended the abolition of the nearest school rule. Are those recommendations being actually implemented in the 2025-26 school year? If so, it means that practically all students applying for a school bus ticket will be deemed eligible, which then means we will need much-increased capacity. Has the Department of Education invested in the school fleet within Bus Éireann? It will have to rely on private contractors to provide some of the services, as it does now, but there are not sufficient private contractors to provide a service for the increased capacity if these recommendations are implemented in this school year. There is also a problem getting drivers. Has been that addressed? Acquiring additional buses and the drivers to drive them requires planning. It cannot be done in a matter of a few weeks. The portal is currently open for students to pay for their school bus ticket or to put in their medical card details and therefore, the Department will know fairly soon how many students are applying for bus tickets. The planning needs to have started long before this to ensure that there is sufficient capacity to accommodate all the students who require a bus place.