Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I have a number of questions I want to ask, and I have little time. Will Mr. Loftus provide the committee with a note of situations where security is paid for, separate from it being included in the contract? We can look at that then.

The Department said it plans years out. County Kildare is growing rapidly and gained 25,000 people between the two most recent censuses. We have obviously had some engagement about the difficulty people are having securing school places, and we have been given an assurance that they will all get a school place this year. I am sure the witnesses will reiterate that, and I hope they will. To use it as an example, children may well get a school place, but they may not be told until June or July where they will be going to school. The applications for the school transport system have already closed.

Where students do not get a place, how does the Department provide for their school transport?

The briefing material contained a section on the climate. Does the Department consider climate at all in terms of the provision of places? I ask because where students are allocated a place it will not be located close to them. I will use the example of children travelling from Enfield to attend a school in Maynooth but there are children who cannot get into that school in Maynooth because there is a sibling policy. Children or young people cannot get into their closest school due to the criss-crossing of locations, just to provide school places. One can see the chaos the policy causes outside schools. It is not just the traffic chaos the policy causes. The policy means one parent must leave his or her job because his or her child must be brought to school due being concessionary, which means that child or young person is not guaranteed a place on a school bus. Where does that policy come in at all?