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

The public transport workers I am talking to are looking at Mr. Barry's CV and seeing that he is a non-executive director of Ervia. That rings a bell in their heads because they know Irish Water was a subsidiary of Ervia and that there was a privatisation agenda there, albeit that has been defeated now by the campaign. They also look at his CV and see that Mr. Barry was involved in €3 billion of private investment in roads through public private partnerships. We have a very particular situation in Bus Éireann at the moment and I am going to concentrate in my comments on that. We have a ballot for strike action if the company tries to implement unilateral changes to rosters from next Sunday. This is an immediate situation. I said I would try to be the voice of bus workers and I make no apology for reading a few quotes from bus workers as reported by thejournal.ie on the current situation with rosters. The first is from a bus worker:

"Look, this is all coming from the NTA (National Transport Association)," one source said. "They contact Bus Éireann, Dublin Bus, Luas, etc, and say that Behaviour and Attitudes surveys say we need more services. So you get the NX (Navan Expressway, launched on 19 September) launched to great fanfare. They tell us to provide it. But the company hasn't sat down to see whether or not we actually can provide it. Do we have the buses? Do we have the drivers? The answer is no we don't, and it's knocked the whole applecart in the region.

The second excerpt is as follows:

"Lads are doing 12-14 hour shifts and then being told to walk back to the depot. Fellas are starting to walk out on the job. There's no work life balance now," says one driver. "The company says it wants efficiency," says another. "Well, so do we. But it’s all very well aiming for 84% efficiency in driving. That leaves no room for efficiency in family life. There's no work/life balance. What are the younger drivers with families supposed to do?"

The last excerpt from the article is a short one:

"At any one time Broadstone is short 100 buses per day," one source says. "And on a day towards the end of October there were 45 private operators in use."

The general secretary of the National Bus and Rail Union, Mr. Dermot O'Leary, has said these are oppressive and unworkable conditions. I put it to Mr. Barry that what the NTA has done is set Bus Éireann up to fail. There have been 120 redundancies and trying to organise rosters for new routes, such as the Navan one, means that either the workers are crucified or private operators are brought in or, as is being done now, a bit of both. The unions and the workers, who are the people who drive the buses every day and know more about the running of a bus company than anyone in the management, in my opinion, have put forward alternative suggestions on the way rosters might be organised. Alternative suggestion after alternative suggestion has been shot down and we are now on the verge of a dispute. I put it to Mr. Barry that it looks very much as though the situation has been set up to fail. Is this an attempt to bring Bus Éireann into disrepute in the eyes of the public and to further a privatisation agenda?