Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I wrote to the committee during the first week when the G spine rolled out because the experience on the ground was such a shambles. I begin by praising Dublin Bus. It has been a fantastic employer over a long period of time. Family members of mine who are retired worked in Dublin Bus and had an exceptional employee experience.

That stands as testament to Dublin Bus as a good employer, on which I congratulate it.

I also congratulate Dublin Bus on how it ran the 79, 79A and 40 bus routes. I have with me a sample email of the many contacts I have received, according to which it was a fantastic, regular, fairly punctual and always reliable service. But then it changed. In the past few weeks, it disappeared and was replaced with the utter shambles that was the G spine. People did not know where their bus stops were or where to go. There was a change of route and they did not know it. There was no communication on this to the public. According to a sample I have put together, no bus stops were flagged, bus routes were changed, there was no change in the apps and people had no idea where the buses would serve and stop. On bus stops where there was a notification, I have photographic examples of some, the notification was too high or too small and people did not pay any heed to them. Bus journeys into the city that would normally take 20 to 30 minutes were now taking over an hour. In several instances, buses that were full to capacity passed by and people had to wait another 20 minutes for the next one to come. That bus would then surprisingly go via Mount Brown, which is a bottleneck at the best of times. The 60 route appears to be a replacement for the 79 and 79A, which should be a quicker route because of the bus lanes, but the number and frequency of buses has been greatly reduced.

From reading the opening statements, this boils down to a number of issues. The first is recruitment, which the NTA says it has known about since last spring. Another is the issue of choked roads, meaning there were infrastructural changes that needed to be made prior to the changing of the bus roll-out. While the public expects information to be reliable, the operator and oversight body know that there are software issues and have not communicated to the public that they cannot and should not rely on the information. There are whole hours of cancelled services on the G spine in particular.

There was also a cyberattack. According to newspaper reports at the time, people were told that they had to rely on screenshots of their rosters in order to know, as there did not appear to be a backup plan. The backup plan took a week or two and people only received the week's basic payments. To be fair, Go-Ahead caught up. I want reassurance that there is a backup plan now should there be another cyberattack, given that cyberattacks are an everyday reality.

Communication to the public is absent. The travelling public are growing in their reliance on public transport and making good choices, but parents are being called out of work to drive their children to school. In Chapelizod, the route was completely changed and direct connectivity between there and the schools in Lucan was removed without infrastructural support, which will not come for another two or three years. To quote Dublin Bus's submission, the "pace of expansion of the network is outstripping the pace of recruitment". The NTA is rolling out bus spines without the necessary recruitment or infrastructure in place. This is unsatisfactory. The NTA is telling us that there are choked roads before we change the infrastructure, yet we know that the NTA is planning to have applied for planning permission on many BusConnects routes by the end of the first quarter of next year. Where is the answer? Where is the reassurance for the public that there is actual planning happening? God knows, enough money is being spent on consultants by the NTA.