APPROXIMATELY 200-250 people turned out in Sixmilebridge this morning for a protest against the decision to stop move local secondary school children away from dedicated school bus services onto public buses.
It was a huge turnout given the 7.20 start time, chosen to reflect the early times that hundreds of children will get the buses from outside McGregors in the centre of Sixmilebridge.
Protestors walked in a loop on both sides of the Sixmilebridge/Shannon road, which they traversed using two pedestrian crossings.
At times they deliberately delayed traffic for relatively short times as part of the protest.
This didn’t always go down well and one woman was struck at low speed by a car, while a bus also hit a male protester. The collisions were at very low speeds and there were no injuries.
“As we were moving, it kind of drove at us, expecting us to move. When we didn’t move he just revved the car up and bumped up against me. It wasn’t a huge bump by any stretch of the imagination, but he did hit me,” said the woman who was struck.
Aoife Keogh was one of the organisers of the protest and she said she was very pleased with the large turnout. “People are going to work, they have families, small children, it’s hard to get out at this hour of the morning but we need to be heard and this is the only way we will be heard.”
She said that a dedicated school bus service for Cratloe was restored on Wednesday night, and that the protests will continue to make sure the same thing happens for Sixmilebridge and Newmarket.
The current plan sees far too many children boarding buses at the same time and place. “There will be 334 children (282 going to Shannon and the rest going to Limerick and Ennis) getting on nine buses in 35 minutes. That’s a lot. Of course there are going to be issues, someone is going to get hurt, that’s the fact of the matter.”
Aoife said that bus drivers are aware that the plans are flawed and that not enough preparatory work has been done. “The bus drivers were in full agreement that a health and safety audit should have been completed. A road safety audit should have been done also.”
Sarah Corbett was in attendance and she is worried about the pressure her son will be under to catch a bus some distance from St Caimin’s just 12 minutes after his last class finishes. ” The days the school finishes at 3.20 he’s on the 3.32 bus. That only gives him 12 minutes to get up from his desk, get his stuff and get from St Caimin’s back up to the church. He’s only 12.”
The change means a big diminution of the quality of local services, she feels. “We all signed up to a service earlier this year, expecting what we got in years gone by, with our children delivered safely to school with no health risk, no danger, that they’d be picked up from outside their door and dropped to within metres of the door safely. Now there’s no guarantee that they’ll get on a bus or arrive on time for school.”
Catherine Fitzpatrick also said that the change being made is not progress. “What we want is what was always there, all the buses to collect the children at various stops around the village to prevent all this gathering at McGregor’s where there are going to be hundreds of children.”
Audrey Linton has a son with autism and she says he would find it very hard to get on a bus in an area where hundreds of children will be milling around. “I want to keep his life as normal as possible, to fit in with every other child. I don’t want to have him having all the extra stresses that come with this, it’s absolutely shocking.”
The issue is going to make the transition to secondary school quite difficult, she feels. “He’s worried. He’s anxious enough about starting school without the extra stresses with the bus. It’s just not on, it’s just not going to work.”
Jennifer Lyons is concerned about her daughter, who is a very anxious child. “I have two kids going to school, one is only starting first year this year and she suffers badly with anxiety. I had enough bother preparing her to go on the bus to school, but now she doesn’t want to go. The problem now is to get her to go. I don’t want her going on a public bus anyway, you don’t know who is on those buses watching young children.”
Jennifer Dowds was another in attendance and she feels the move is imposing an urban solution onto an area that is not comparable. “We’re a rural community and we’re told it works in Dublin. It does when you have alternative options to get there, you have options in an urban setting, but not in a rural place like this, that’s off the beaten track. I’m guessing that our buses were taken to fill the rural routes that weren’t filled last year, they said there’s a bus service there, a bad one, but there it is. Someone in Bus Éireann ticked the box and said ‘didn’t I do well there’.”
Owen Ryan has been a journalist with the Clare Champion since 2007, having previously worked with a number of other publications in Limerick, Cork and Galway. His first book will be published in December 2024.