School Transport
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-15
============================================================

Brian Stanley (IND), Laois

I thank the Minister of State for that. The issue is straightforward: bus drivers on the school transport scheme cannot drive beyond their 60th birthday. They cannot drive a minibus for two or three hours a day with ten or 15 pupils on it, yet they can drive a 50- or 60-seater coach hundreds of miles, and are doing so. School bus operators are losing drivers every year, and in Laois this is a real problem. They are finding it very difficult to replace them because the work is part-time and really suits retired people. I emphasise this to the Minister of State and the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien. The cohort driving the school buses is largely retired people. People generally retire at 60 or 65 and get five or ten years' driving. I am not asking for them to keep going until 100 or 90 years of age; I am simply proposing that they go to 75 on the condition that they pass a strict medical test. This is the key. I do not want to endanger anybody. I can understand Bus Éireann and other bus operators being concerned, but there are real issues starting to arise here. I refer to somebody driving a minibus two or three hours a day five or ten miles to a local school. They can drive 50-, 60- and 70-seater coaches, which they are doing and I know people who are doing it, yet they cannot drive their local school bus. That is a ridiculous situation. The Minister of State is right that we need to address the safety issue, but we need to solve this issue as well.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-15