Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I put it on my agenda to attend this meeting because I feel so strongly about the important role rural transport plays in rural development. I do not know whether the witnesses have appeared before this committee previously. Perhaps Mr. Boland or someone else from Irish Rural Link has.

I live 5 km from the closest village and 17 km from the closest town. I am a member of the Green Party and there is this notion that we all live in Dublin and cycle everywhere, but I am more aware than most of what it is like to live in a rural area. Last summer, I had the misfortune of breaking my leg. I was unable to drive, so I could not go anywhere.

Local Link has to be praised. It is an amazing service that goes where the public service operator, Bus Éireann, and public service obligation, PSO, service providers do not or have never gone. It is an important service.

In Clare, Local Link services have increased, but we associate them with being for people with disabilities and old people only, so the public relations, PR, piece is missing at a local scale, albeit not at a national scale. I would like to see Local Link being provided funding to promote its services locally. For example, many people in rural areas do not know about Leap cards. It was not too long ago that I discovered I could use a Leap card outside Dublin. There is one place in the entire county of Clare where you can buy a Local Link card. We are not all online and we do not all know about apps, especially people who do not have cars. Those who do have cars know nothing about it either because they have never needed to look into it. I only discovered recently that, if I drive or cycle to my local village, I can then hop on a bus with my Leap card and it will cost me €3 to get to Ennis, whereas previously it was €5.50. It is a great service, but we are missing the PR piece.

I have met Mr. Boland several times. As he said, if there is no bus pole or no Leap card sticker saying a shop sells or updates Leap cards, as can be seen all over Dublin and other cities, the possibility does not cross your mind.

We have to get rural people thinking differently. We all drive everywhere, including me, and now we are responsible for half the carbon emissions. We must halve transport carbon emissions, and if we do not take rural dwellers' choices seriously, we are not going to reach those targets. Unfortunately, around 1.4 million people live outside villages and towns, which means we are responsible for quite a lot of the carbon emissions from cars. What is the vision from the NTA around that? I ask because I do not see any bus stop poles going up anywhere there are existing official bus stops. I do not buy into the narrative we need a lay-by, a footpath and lights, because that is not best practice in other parts of the world. The stops are put where there is a line of sight, then the bus stops and the cars just wait. Until we accept that as a normal thing for car drivers to have to do, we are going nowhere with rural transport. Accordingly, we need to see the poles put back where the official bus stops are as a first step.

The second point is about timetables. I have been saying for four years that all over north Clare we have rural bus stops with timetables that are four years old. I am sure it is the same in other counties. This is not rocket science. Those stops must be updated with current timetables. The third point is about frequency. Frequency is brilliant, but the last bus out of most county towns is at 6.30 p.m. or 7.30 p.m. and therefore our county towns are dead at night because everybody has to leave. If we even had one night with a service that got people into town at 6 p.m. and returned at 10 p.m. or even 1 a.m., it would allow loads of rural people to go into urban areas to the cinema, a meal or whatever. Our towns are drained at night because there is no way of getting in and out.

I am asking for everything here because if we want to halve our carbon emissions we need everything. The spend on investment in rural transport should be just as great as it is in Dublin and so on because we are doing a lot of the driving but we need choices. On that, it is great we have new PSO bus services, but now we cannot bring bikes on buses. That is a pity because in other jurisdictions people with disabilities are enabled to travel on a bus along with cyclists, so I do not want to hear the response that the buses had to be lowered for people with disabilities and is that not what we want, because of course I want that. Mr. Boland mentioned an integrated service. What part does cycling play in that? What about Irish Rail not being involved in Connecting Ireland? I did some research into this and found that 16 times a day a bus comes into Ennis station five minutes after the train leaves. I met the CEO of Irish Rail and he was not consulted about this at all. Are we ever going to get all the public transport people into one room to finally connect Ireland? I was sure that is what Connecting Ireland was all about.

It is easy for me to throw mud at our guests, but we have come a long way in the past two and a half years and I do not want to be entirely negative. We have done a lot, but we still have an awful lot more to do if we are serious about rural transport. I got a bus shelter in my village a few weeks ago and we nearly hit a bottle of champagne off it. We thought it was amazing. There are ten bus shelters in the county. There are no standards, so it is haphazard. Every local authority is different. The Bus Éireann people say local authorities must request the bus stops, but the local authorities say it is up to Bus Éireann. Then it is the NTA, then it is TFI and then TII. It is always very complicated to find out who is responsible for what. I have been trying to get a bus stop in Doolin for four and half years. I finally got the Clare County Council engineer and a Bus Éireann guy at the same spot at the same time in Doolin and thought that would be it at last after four years. Now he has to go off to somebody in the NTA about something else and who knows when it will actually happen.

I will finish by saying if we do not do proper PR, people will not know. I say all the time I am doing PR for the bus companies. I am going around printing bus timetables for Local Link and Bus Éireann and laminating them, giving them to people, sticking them in shop windows and giving them to older people's groups so their members know. It is great I can now get a bus from my village seven times a day, but people do not know. There is no point in having something great if people are not aware of it. I would love to know the NTA's vision for rural bus stops. We must have a way of stopping the bus without having to get to a town or village. It is about where it is safe to do so. All that is needed is a line of sight. That is what is done in France, Germany, Holland and other places. I do not want to be told by anybody it can only be done if we can make a lay-by. We will have a huge song and dance about it and it will never happen. If the car drivers can see the bus and they know there is a stop there, then they get used to it. That is what we have to move towards.