Mr. Dermot O'Leary:

I thank Deputy Lawless for his remarks and also for his contribution in terms of his observations. I will try to answer the questions, with the last one first.

The stakeholders forum, as far as we are concerned in the NBRU, should include all those groups that have a role to play. It should not be owned by any one group. The policy decisions today, as we see it, are made by a group in which we have no role. Commuter groups should be involved along with other stakeholders. For example, we are here with our colleagues from the taxi industry.

In relation to the 24-hour economy, we observed in our research before we put in our submission that there was a 24-hour commission established in London on the issue of having an economy running right through the night, not only on the entertainment and bar industry which we are all familiar with but where cultural venues could be open and, indeed, the economy itself and retail units could be open. Of course, there is much stakeholder involvement in that as well and it would need to be discussed. The programme for Government mentions that. From that perspective, it is encouraging.

In relation to the enforcement issue that Deputy Lawless raised, I made the remark to Deputy Carroll MacNeill earlier that by and large people are complying with the face coverings. There is a small minority who are not. There is that issue that is still hanging out there. I should remind the Deputies that we have been calling for a dedicated Garda public transport division for quite some time now. We have support from the Garda representative bodies on that and they could have had a role here, had they been resourced properly.

In terms of the Deputy's observations on Irish Rail in getting the trains, we wrote to Irish Rail as recently as last week indicating that we have a problem representing workers on the train services with the capacity issue. I am at pains to point to my own people as much as anybody else that we will take public health advice on the social distance being reduced, but we will not have a situation where we compromise the health and safety of our members and, indeed, the travelling public. There is an issue in enforcement of capacity issues. I suppose, anecdotally, we have a situation where people are travelling in numbers, they all want to travel together and they are inclined to sit in between the carriages, and that is a problem.

The issue relating to school buses will be very complex and will be predicated, we assume, on the decisions when they are made about the return to school. Bus Éireann carries approximately 117,000 children to school each day, which is 41 million journeys each year. Many of the operators that work for Bus Éireann are private indigenous interests, demonstrating clearly that while the unions might be described as anti-private, we do a lot of work with private coaches and they complement the publicly-owned companies.