Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Commissioner. I have only one question, concerning privatisation in the transport sector, which is under way in Ireland. In the case of provincial bus services, for instance, recent Governments have positively encouraged the arrival of private operators onto the scene and have hamstrung the semi-State company.

Recently, under a EU diktat, 10% of Dublin Bus services were put out to public tender. Incredibly, even though Dublin Bus, the State provider, had submitted the lowest bid, the tender was awarded to the other competitor, a private company from the United Kingdom called Go Ahead. We touched on the matter of Brexit this morning. The British Prime Minister, Mrs. Theresa May's vision for Britain is of a bargain basement Brexit with US style regulation and a lack of workers' rights. Go Ahead is a company which typifies and personifies bargain basement Britain. We know that more privatisations are under way in this field owing to the EU diktat. The privatisation of transport services in other European countries happened before it happened in Ireland. Other countries have had many years of experience of what happens when one goes down the road to transport privatisation. It has been a fairly bitter experience for many countries and led to a rethink. In recent years there has been a reversal of policy away from privatisation towards remunicipalisation and renationalisation of services. As the Commissioner will be familiar with them,I will just instance a few. In Portugal, in Lisbon and Porto, the country's two biggest cities, there has been remunicipalisation where privatisation has been reversed. The same process has occurred in London and Tyne and Wear in the United Kingdom, in Kiel and Solingen in Germany; while in France in Toulouse and Clarement-Ferrand, Nice and Cannes there has been a move away from privatisation and towards remunicipalisation. In Austria it has happened in Vienna and Niederösterreich, while in the United Kingdom there is a question of renationalising rail services.

Why has this happened? Dr. Tom O'Connor of Cork Institute of Technology recently presented a conference paper in which he highlighted three issues, the first of which was private sector failure, in which regard he instanced the collapse of transport public private partnerships in London. The second was greater efficiency and lower costs, with public authorities being almost always able to borrow at lower rates than private companies. There is also the cost of tendering and monitoring tendering which can add 10% or more to contracts. Third, there is the achievement of public service objectives. It is easier to do this when a utility is publicly owned rather than when it is in private hands serving shareholders by maximising profit. One cannot control what one does not own.

Given that the experience of transport privatisation in Europe has been a bitter one and that governments and cities have drawn lessons and are moving away from privatisation towards renationalisation and remunicipalisation for sound reasons, why is it that the European Union and the Commission continue with this privatisation mantra and drive it under the guise of tendering, although we know from the Dublin Bus experience what tendering means which is more privatisation, even though it has been seen to fail?

What is the Commission and the European Union doing to encourage the manufacture of buses to make them more accessible for people with mobility issues and a visual impairment?