Ireland’s School Transport Costs Exceed 2025 Budget by €96 Million

Ireland's school transport programme cost €479 million in 2025, €96 million more than the original €383 million provision, the country's Comptroller and Auditor General told a parliamentary committee on 5 November 2026. The difference is approximately 25.1% of the original allocation. It is a budget overrun, not a finding that €96 million was stolen or lost.

At the Dáil Public Accounts Committee hearing, Comptroller and Auditor General Seamus McCarthy questioned the transparency of how the programme is funded. According to reporting of his testimony by The Irish Times, he said the explanation given for the overspend was that the original estimate did not adequately reflect demand for school transport.

The programme served approximately 181,000 pupils in 2025, including about 24,000 with special educational needs. A pre-hearing account by Midwest Radio, based on the committee's announced scrutiny, independently recorded the €479 million expenditure, the €96 million additional allocation and the scale of pupil participation.

The costs have implications for future budgets. The department's allocation for school transport rose to €641 million in 2026, with €687 million earmarked for 2027. These are budget figures for different years, not evidence of a completed saving, contract award or financial loss.

The Department of Education and Youth funds the programme and contracts Bus Éireann to administer it. Bus Éireann directly operates only a small share of services, with the majority provided by contractors. At the hearing, the company's chief executive said the 2025 operation involved 1,448 contractors and 11,241 routes, according to The Irish Times.

The spending pressures are not uniform across pupils. Department secretary general Bernie McNally told the committee that transport for pupils with special educational needs accounted for roughly 60% of the programme's budget while serving around 13% of its passengers. She said the per-pupil cost was about €14,000 for those services compared with approximately €1,480 for mainstream transport. These figures describe different service requirements and do not establish that any individual route was improperly procured.

McNally pointed to unusually high demand, including the arrival of children displaced from Ukraine, and the more complex logistics of specialist transport. She said work to implement the existing school transport review was progressing, but technology, timing and funding constraints remained.

The hearing also exposed a measurement problem: some ticket holders do not use their allocated seat every day, yet officials said they lacked reliable, timely utilisation data needed to offer unused seats safely to other pupils. That makes accurate demand forecasting and transport access related oversight questions rather than interchangeable measures.

The committee's next accountability test is whether revised demand estimates, route-utilisation data and published budget explanations improve before another annual funding cycle. No court finding of illegality or determination of fraud was reported at the hearing.