Mr. Stephen Kent:

I thank the Deputy for his comments about staff.

To answer the question, there are two aspects. One aspect is the infrastructure that the Deputy has talked about. As he can see, under the consultations that we will have on the city, there is massive change required for a number of those cities. There is just 30 km of bus prioritisation available outside Dublin, which is a radically low number. If one looks at the consultation that is put in place for Limerick, for instance, where it proposes to get up to about 84 km in the city alone from its current 12 km. Places like that, and putting that level of prioritisation in, will ensure confidence in the service and reliability regarding all of those issues that the Deputy talked about. There is massive infrastructural development required in the regional cities to get bus prioritisation measures in place. They need to be supported, with all of the things that he mentioned, bus gateways and all of those things that would allow buses to come in to closures and to give them prioritisation. Nobody likes to be here, on my side of a table, ever having to apologise for the fact that the service has run late. In fact, everything that we are trying to do every single day is to work on punctuality and service improvements. So we are doing that in a measured way but to make the step change one needs the infrastructural change that the Deputy talked about and that investment needs to come.

The second part is vehicle investment. Currently, we operate with a fleet of 1,100 vehicles and a lot of those are mixed age vehicles. I am delighted to say that we had tranches of investment that came in in 2008 but then there was nothing until 2012 and another burst in 2015. One needs steady State investment for a fleet and all of those things will get addressed now. That is why I am delighted, under the national development plan, NDP, because it will provide capacity needs. I must say that in the last of couple of years there has been huge investment by the National Transport Authority, NTA, to move from single decks to double decks so one will see, in regional cities, that a lot of those have come in in the last couple of years. Now there are better energy efficient vehicles and everything is targeted at trying to move to having low to zero emissions. So having the investment for those reasons alone is worthwhile.

On schools, it has been a very difficult part because we operate less than 10% of the services directly, under school transport, and a lot of those are reliant on vehicles that are cascaded old to new. We have not secured investment at the levels required for school transport at this point and that is the subject of analysis with the Department. To answer the Deputy's question, we need investment for school transport because I do not believe that children should be treated any differently. In fact, a greener cleaner school fleet turning up at schools is such a positive message.

On the NTA, it has made great strides with investment in vehicles. The NTA has funded double decker hybrids and hydrogen buses. The only issue that we have, for instance on the Expressway routes, is that there is not currently anything outside of Euro 6 diesel engines for longer intercity routes but there are trials under way and we hope that things like hydrogen technology might come to bear to make them better. On investment, particularly in commercial, people want toileted buses. They want a relatively good standard of buses for their journeys and we need to be able to make sure that we give them that relative to the power. We used to promote Expressway with the line "like the car, only better", and that is exactly how I feel. It is what people get out of it. As members will know, three out of four journeys in this country are by car. That is a lot and we have to change that mindset. So what I see in the NDP is investment in infrastructure, quality of service and fleet, and all of those things combined will move us a long way on the green agenda.