Deadline to pay for school bus tickets extended

By Niall Murray Education Correspondent

The deadline to pay for school bus tickets has been extended by Bus Éireann amid growing frustrations over its online payments system.

Although families can still pay by post, the company expects an increase in online payments on last year, when 70% of the 70,000 used its website to buy their tickets.

However, less than 30,000 had registered with its online payment system by yesterday evening, with just over 17,700 having completed payments or submitted medical card details to qualify for a fee waiver.

The online system has been affected by technical problems since the company moved to upgrade it over the past fortnight, some of which are still being worked on by the company. The Department of Education had been monitoring progress and Bus Éireann has now decided to extend the deadline, by a week to August 1.

“We’re 20% ahead of last year on numbers paying online, and often people do not make payments until the last minute,” a spokesperson said. “But the decision has been made because of the concerns out there, and we don’t want people to be worried.”

The company expects to have a freephone helpline running from tomorrow, for queries about the online system, after complaints last week that customers could not get through to regional school transport offices.

Fianna Fáil education spokesman Charlie McConalogue said moves to get systems online should continue but parents must have an option to use traditional methods.

“A significant proportion of the population don’t have the digital literacy to do this or have no access to adequate, or any, broadband,” he said. “This is particularly the case in many parts of rural Ireland, which rely significantly on school transport.”

Don Myers, National Parents’ Council-Post Primary president, urged parents to be patient.

“A lot of parents were irate over this, the biggest problem was that their registration hadn’t gone through and the deadline was coming up,” said Mr Myers. “But use of the system is up on last year and an assurance has been given that nobody will be discommoded.”

The online facility requires families to register the location of their home on an Ordnance Survey map. Bus Éireann could not provide a figure for the savings from this measure, which it said will significantly reduce the need for staff to manually check distances from schools to determine school transport eligibility.

The €170m school transport system carried 116,000 children from more than 70,000 families last year.