Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate why Ms Graham does not want to focus on one operator, but the area where I live has quite a high level of the routes that Go-Ahead operates so she will forgive me saying that I receive many complaints about that particular operator. When I raised it last year, the reason given was Covid. I understand it is now recruitment issues. I appreciate that is a real issue right across various sectors in society at present. However, it is not simply about the display of real-time information but, rather, the dependability and reliability of a public transport service.

If you get the A20 every morning and the A20 becomes the A40, you have a lot of explaining to do and you start to wonder whether it is a form of transport you can rely on. As it is at the top of the hierarchy or food chain, I would like the NTA to start flexing its muscles and say it is not acceptable. As I said last year, if the operators are not able to operate that route, the possibility of taking it from them needs to be seriously examined. I am not seeing that level of urgency in this. We are talking about an urban area. My colleagues spoke about rural Ireland. I shudder to think that if this service was in a rural town, there would be a whole swathe of people who would not be able to get to work. We have a serious problem, which I am trying to emphasise to the NTA. I know the witnesses understand because they receive the complaints. However, I would hazard a guess that, on the balance of probability, when, for example, Dublin Bus, with a larger volume of routes is compared to a smaller operator with a smaller number of routes, the level of complaints - it is certainly true of my area - is higher for the one that is not the semi-State operator.