Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 27 February 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport

Rural Taxis and Rural Transport Programme: Discussion

Photo of Éamon Ó CuívÉamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have been working on this issue for a considerable period and have given it thought. On the issue of standards, if it is safe for one, it is safe for the other and if it is unsafe for one, it is unsafe for the other. That is a basic rule.

Uber is a different matter. It is more an urban than a rural phenomenon. It is up to the enforcement authorities to deal with anybody who is operating illegally. I certainly have never made a case for any service that does not comply with standards. The characterisation of the issue does not reflect the rural area in which I live. Some people here would consider it to be a very rural area. We do not think it is isolated and the issue is not quite as simple as it is being made out to be. There are plenty of taxi or hackney licences all over rural Ireland, including in these so-called isolated areas. Like good fishermen, however, drivers frequent the pools with plenty of fish. I know taxi or hackney drivers who will drive 30 miles to Galway city or Castlebar and fish from those pools. Why would they not rather than hanging around their own localities?

One of the first things our guests need to get out of their heads is idea that if a taxi driver's home is in a particular area, this automatically means that there will be a service available in the area. That is not the case. I recall one night being at a meeting on the edge of Galway city, which is not big, and some people were complaining that the location was too far out of town and that it was an awful long way to travel. We were nearly falling off our chairs laughing. I had travelled 35 miles to get there and would have to travel 35 miles to get home. In my area, we think that a location 10 miles away is next door.

I do not know if our guests check the mental condition of the people who get into their cars. This is about loneliness or whatever. I live in rural Ireland. I guarantee that I am not lonely. My neighbours are not any more lonely than the people in the cities but we need access to public service vehicles. I own a car. There are two cars in my home. There are only two of us in it. We have to have two cars but if we want to go out for a night and have a meal and have something to drink, very modestly, we have no way to get home. On the idea of the distance affecting older people exclusively, the big market is ordinary people doing ordinary things. Urban and rural living are not so different. We need to get away from bland characterisations.

I am familiar with Dublin. I am from here and I grew up here. If I want to get from A to B, I have three choices - the train, the bus and a hackney or a taxi. There are no bus or train services in my area at home. The problem arises when I want to use a taxi to go 5 or 10 miles. It might not be to the next village, I might go to the one beyond that but I think I should have that choice. I would have it in Dublin.

We have buried the Uber point and that relating to standards. My view was that Local Link would identify the areas that cannot be sure to have a service at given times. That would vary from time to time as the market went up or down. It could offer a contract to people who were qualified to provide a service on a contract basis, the person would have to be available within the hours in the area and if, through illness or whatever, he or she was not going to be available, he or she would ring in and Local Link would contact someone else. There would be a system whereby on a Friday night there would be two hackneys available from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. in area A. They would operate within a certain radius, depending on the area, for example, Belmullet is very different from the area in which I live. No two areas are the same. In return, the driver would get a fixed payment, the equivalent, for example, of paying the insurance. It would be like getting a contract for a private company but in this case it would tie the driver down at the fixed times but the rest of the time, when the driver was not on contract, the taxi could go anywhere because the driver has a licence. The rural hackney licence is a cod. There are 11 in the country so we can rub that off the slate.

Some parts of rural Ireland are quite well populated but do not have guaranteed services. The people want to know that they can pick up the phone and look for the hackney and that in ten or 15 minutes there will be somebody at the door, as is the case in Dublin. That is all we are looking for. It is mind-bogglingly simple. The market does that in the urban areas. To make sure that happens we need a contract to make sure the person is there and to get the contract it is necessary to give them a little bit of dosh.

Let us look at the figures. In that context, €60 million goes to Dublin Bus and €50 million to Bus Éireann. The taxis are not getting the subsidy in urban transport but the buses are.

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