School buses could become another Stardust

A news item this morning about 18 youngsters being injured in a bus accident reminded me of a perennial chestnut. School buses. The disgrace of Irish school buses.

The ‘Stardust waiting to happen’ of the Irish school bus system.

I’m not in any way getting at the operators of school buses, or the drivers of school buses, who in each case are simply dealing with the system as it is presented to them.

Particularly the drivers of such buses, who often have to cope with very unruly and high-spirited youngsters either full of pep after a night’s rest, or running a bit wild after a day cooped up in classrooms.

They’ve told me themselves, they can’t drive safely and mind what’s going on behind them at the same time. It is a simple impossibility.

Maybe there could be conductors to keep everybody quiet? Oh no, too expensive, say the departmental bean counters. Too expensive for a child’s life, or yours or mine if a distracted bus driver happens to stray across the road? I personally know of at least one instance, some years ago and locally, of a child dying after falling out of a moving school bus, perhaps after horseplay.

Then there’s the bureaucratic bean counting that says three schoolchildren can fit in the space of two adult seats, leading to overcrowding of many buses and an impossible safety situation in case of a crash.

Impossible? Yes, because even if seat belts were fitted to these coaches, they would be unusable in the ‘three bums in two seats’ scenario.

Seat belts? Of course, there are no seat belts anyway, and there’s never any real push to have them installed except when there’s a high-profile fatal coach accident abroad and the idea gets mooted around for a while, before fading into the limbo of yesterday’s worry. Except that every year a number of parents express just such worries. Then give up as they bang their heads off an implacable wall of official disinterest masquerading as ‘we’re examining various possibilities’.

While I’m at it, what about the problem of schoolchildren being injured or worse in traffic after getting off the school bus? There’s no regulation in this country compelling drivers of other vehicles to stop while a school bus in front of them is stopped. This is how it is in the US, for example, and it is strongly enforced. In Ireland, children die in this kind of accident.

Maybe I’m being a bit premature here, though. Maybe there are moves afoot to deal with the various problems I’ve mentioned. They are serious safety issues, after all. They do affect our children, after all. And they’ve been around long enough to have solutions devised.

But we live in a country where, all those years after Stardust, our fire services and local authorities still don’t have the resources to monitor and enforce regulations which would prevent that from happening again.

Where building regulations brought into force almost a decade ago are being flouted because there is one Buildings Inspector per local authority on average and he or she are so tied up with planning applications work that they can’t check up on whether buildings are being built to specification.

Where we have a Minister for Disasters who still doesn’t even realise what a disaster he is in that position (‘there is important work to be done and I must be getting on with it’, or words to that effect, he said afterwards).

Or maybe there will NEVER be a serious accident involving a school bus where maybe up to 30 families will lose children?

Well, based on this morning’s news, though NOT involving a school bus, I believe, the parents of 18 children are counting themselves lucky not to be in that position this weekend.

Maybe it is a wake-up call. For someone. If they’re listening.

If they care.

©2001brianbyrne/IrishCar.Com

(Brian Byrne is editorial director of IrishCar.Com)