Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The focus of attention is College Green, and we are talking about the possibility of moving bus routes. Some of them have been redirected already. I looked at the figure for the number of buses and the areas from where they are originating and they include Monkstown, Dún Laoghaire, Bray, Ashtown, Clondalkin, Dundrum, Lucan, Blanchardstown, Malahide, Balbriggan, Swords, Leixlip, Maynooth and Celbridge. Some of them are city speeds. That tells us that it is not just buses that are being discommoded; it is people.

Part of the reason some of the termini were selected was because there is an inadequate amount of kerb space for buses in the city, so people have got used to this route across city. As far as I can recall, when the Luas line was being selected, Dublin Bus had a lot to say about this being a potential problem for it. This is not a teething problem, therefore; it is something that was foreseen.

What modelling are the various organisations doing, even at this late stage, to do it not just on a piecemeal basis but to examine the likely scenarios if some of the buses are redirected? It is very difficult for people to get used to different routes. They will be fixed on a public transport route. They select it because it gets them to their destination, and the destination is not always a terminus; sometimes it is somewhere in between. That discommoding of a very large population that, generally, is on the periphery of the city is likely to lose market share for Dublin Bus. What modelling is being done to deal with that?

Going back to the Dublin transportation initiative, Luas would have been part of that, but so also would other initiatives, for example, the DART underground. In the provision of public transport, is there surface room for what we need if those type of alternatives to public transport are not provided?

With regard to Dublin City Council, Dublin is our capital city. I represent Kildare North, but I am a Dubliner who has gone in the other direction. I do not have anything negative to say about Dublin, but there is a mindset that is about looking at the city centre as though it is a functional area as opposed to it being a capital city that has, whether we like it or not, a sizeable amount of the population in the greater Dublin area that requires to be taken into account when changes in the city centre are being considered. What networking is done with regard to the greater Dublin area? The College Green issue definitely translates as though it is a city centre issue but if we are to discommoding people, we are discommoding people who are travelling into the city rather than people who are living in it. What networking is done to consider people from outside of the functional area of Dublin?