When the Free School Transport Scheme was introduced by the Irish Government in 1968, a fleet of 800 dedicated schoolbuses (the SS class) were built. However when these came up for end-of-life replacement in the 1990s, there was insufficient funds to purchase new dedicated schoolbuses, and so cascaded service buses were used instead.
In 2007, Bus Eireann purchased a smaller number of dedicated build schoolbuses as a trial, one of which is this BMC vehicle, BS9, seen here in Kilgarven, Co. Kerry.
AllAboutBuses 