Robbie Gallagher (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Bus Éireann school transport portal is open for applications and expires on Friday, the 25th of this month, so I encourage all families who intend to send their children to school via Bus Éireann school transport to make those applications before that date.

Today, however, I wish to talk about the mandatory retirement age of 70 years that Bus Éireann insists on for drivers driving schoolchildren to school in the morning. This is discriminatory and an ageist policy that needs to be addressed and re-examined. We will be here come September discussing school transport and no doubt there will be a shortage of buses, but we will have a bigger problem in that there will be buses but nobody to drive them. We have a cohort of people who are fit and well, who are medically assessed, who have their driving licences and who are keen to work but, unfortunately, the system being adopted by Bus Éireann, the one-size-fits-all attitude, does not allow them to do so. There is no problem with a 70-plus-year-old driving a school bus in the UK so I do not see why there should be a problem here. We now have a large cohort of people who are post retirement, quite a lot of whom are driving school buses and very happy to do so. It is not a 40-hour-a-week job; it is an hour or an hour and a half in the morning and perhaps the same in the afternoon. It is not overly taxing, and surely to God the same medical assessment carried out by Bus Éireann on a 69-year-old who is deemed capable of driving a school bus could be carried out on a 70-year-old or a 71-year-old. Bus Éireann needs to examine this. I ask that the Ceannaire write to the Minister about this issue and ask him to re-examine this criterion adopted by Bus Éireann.