Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Courtney. As Senator Mooney said, it is ideal that someone who has been a conductor and a driver and took courses in transport economics is appointed to the role. In the lectures I gave I referred to the fact that if we can get things right a bus lane can, as someone said earlier, move large numbers of people very quickly without the kind of capital investment required by underground and railway systems, which took over the glamour end of this business. The bus is still the workhorse. I hope Dublin Bus will be seen as a higher priority.

The committee recently held negotiations with Mr. Keegan on a different matter.

Dublin Bus buses go up one-way streets, have priority at junctions and so on because they carry more people. Can the success of the Stillorgan quality bus corridor, which was impressive, and the one on the Malahide Road, which had a very high share of the market at one stage, be repeated?

As Mr. Courtney said, the staff are very important. Something I note when I bring tourists on the city tours is the incredible wit of the drivers. When we passed by the Rotunda on one of them, the driver said, "That is the best hospital in the world. I am saying that because more people come out of it than go into it." The Dublin Bus driver's wit is one of the company's great assets, and everybody was delighted with it. We had to translate it into German for some people but that kind of Dubliner, as a tourist investor in the open top buses, is brilliant for the city.

I wish Mr. Courtney every good fortune and share the appreciation of everybody else around this table. He could not have been better chosen in terms of his recent human relations background, all the courses he did and from where he started. If there is anything we can do in the Seanad, and I am sure in the Dáil also, that would be of use to him he can come back to us because everyone wants the type of transport service he is seeking to develop. In engineering terms it became less fashionable than much more expensive solutions but we still have a debt to GDP rate of 120%, so some of the expensive solutions might have to wait. Mr. Courtney is welcome aboard, and congratulations on his appointment.