Analysis: The Co Offaly bus crash underlines the vulnerability of our schoolchildren in an unregulated area of the transport system, writes Seán Flynn, Education Editor
If the Navan bus crash last May focused attention on the shortcomings of the Department of Education's school transport system, yesterday's accident put the spotlight on a parallel school transport system - but one without regulation or supervision.
The 17-year-old Mercedes bus involved in yesterday's crash had been hired privately by parents of pupils attending Killina Presentation School.
The 400-pupil co-educational school has a strong reputation across Co Offaly and attracts pupils from across the county.
Many of these pupils, like those making the journey at 8.30am yesterday, live well outside the school catchment area.
Consequently they do not qualify for a school bus operated by the Department of Education's school transport programme.
The department says the school transport system runs in tandem with "overall school planning".
Translation: the department won't subsidise parents opting to send their children to schools outside the immediate catchment area.
In other words, it will not support any transport system that might help to undermine the viability of local schools.
It is for this reason that the children were travelling yesterday morning on a bus operating outside the ambit of the department.
There are, as the Taoiseach noted in the Dáil yesterday, two parallel school transport systems: the department's, which operates within a tightly regulated environment since last year's tragedy in Navan, and an alternative system where there is little supervision and no regulation.
The department says it has no way of knowing how many children are ferried to school by private bus contractors hired by parents. Unofficial estimates put the number at several thousand.
This includes children, like those in Co Offaly, who attend a school outside their immediate catchment area; and those who attend some fee-paying schools in Dublin and elsewhere and do not qualify for the department's transport programme.
The Navan bus crash in which five schoolgirls died last May resulted in the department upgrading standards for its school transport programme. Over €152 million will be spent this year providing transport to more than 138,000 school children.
By the end of the year, it is hoped there will be one seatbelt and one seat for every child on a school bus. The much-criticised "two for three" system, where three students are forced to share two adult seats, is expected to be abolished by next December.
The new safety measures required an initial one-off capital investment of €25 million, plus an additional €11.5 million in funding per year.
In the Dáil yesterday the Opposition parties accepted that great strides had been made in improving safety standards in the department's fleet, which includes buses and coaches as well as taxis made available to several thousand special needs children.
The question now is how these regulations can be enforced outside the official department system.
Fine Gael says it should be mandatory for all schoolchildren to wear safetybelts on all school transport, private or public.
For most parents, this would appear a sensible starting point. But many, forced to find transport outside the State system, are entrusting the safety of their children to a system that is wholly unsatisfactory.