I want to raise the annual school transport crisis that a lot of families face. It is particularly pertinent in rural areas, particularly where I am living in Carlow-Kilkenny. We all know that back to school time for parents and families is incredibly stressful. There is huge expense. Parents are also having to scramble to find alternative ways to get their children to school. This time around, we saw Bus Éireann notifying parents at the last minute, and in some cases just a week before school was due to start, that their children were not going to get bus places even though in the previous year they had received them, or that they were no longer getting tickets. It is not a new problem; it is an annual problem that we have. We need to get our heads together and discuss how to fix it. I know there is a review in place, but we cannot have families facing struggles year after year. I have heard from parents regarding a school on the Carlow-Laois border, Knockbeg College. They rely heavily on school buses because of the location of the college. There is no public bus route to get to the school from Carlow, so there is no way of getting to school.

There are single parents, parents who do not drive, parents who have additional caring duties with other children that mean they cannot leave home twice a day during the school rushes, parents who are trying to get younger children to crèche, etc. People have complex lives. They are massively struggling to get their kids to school.

There are so many inconsistencies with aspects of the school transport scheme. It does not reflect the reality of families living in rural areas. It is not functioning perfectly. There are solutions. We had a review of the school transport scheme in 2024 that referred the need to expand the capacity by 100,000 places by 2030. As for those who do not win a seat in the lottery - it is a lottery - children as young as 12 end up navigating complex bus services alone. I have had reports of children who have got lost on the way to school because they are having to get multiple buses. It is just not safe. There are massive issues and challenges with it from a safeguarding perspective. Some young children are leaving the house at 7 a.m. and not getting home until 5.30 p.m. We are expecting them to do their homework then, having been hours and hours out of the house. We are frustrated when we hear about commuters leaving at 7 a.m. and not getting back until after 6 p.m., so schoolchildren facing that too is incredible to me.

We have a scarcity of school bus places and we also have families holding on to their tickets. If they are lucky enough to get a ticket in the lottery they hold on to it, even though they might be driving their kids to school. This means we have school buses that are not at full capacity often travelling past the houses of people whose children need spaces on the bus. They can see there are spaces but they are not available because other parents do not want to give up their ticket even if they are not regularly using it. We need to have a use-it-or-lose-it policy with the concessionary ticket because there is no logic to empty seats on school buses that other kids cannot access.

Obviously we have the question of our emissions and the need to reduce them. We have a cost-of-living crisis with families to the pin of their collar and we are exacerbating it. That children cannot get concessionary tickets to travel to school exacerbates a load of other crises families are facing. The current system is a shambles and unfit for purpose. I really hope that by next September we have a functioning system. We should have a debate on this because I know from other Senators that it impacts lots of different people, mostly in rural areas. I recognise that in places like Dublin there is so much transport that it will not have the same impact but it is one of those things that worries so many households and families annually.