Mr. Stephen Kent:

Bus Éireann is Ireland’s national State-owned bus company. We operate the most extensive and varied public transport network in the country covering the city services of Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford along with town services in Athlone, Balbriggan, Drogheda, Dundalk, Navan and Sligo. With the National Transport Authority, NTA, we will soon be introducing Carlow’s first town service - hopefully, by the end of this month. We also operate regional and rural routes. All these services across almost 230 routes are delivered under contract with the NTA. We also operate a commercial inter-regional coach business, Expressway, which is the largest coach operator in the country. It is not State-subvented. Bus Éireann operates the school transport scheme on behalf of the Department of Education. Many members are very familiar with the vital role this public service plays in homes throughout Ireland as well as its role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and traffic congestion.

I am delighted to say that public transport in Ireland is transforming. My last engagement with the committee concerned the impact of Covid-19 on the business. I do not think any of us anticipated that within a year of the removal of all public health restrictions, Bus Éireann would be carrying between 20 and 30% more passengers than it did pre-pandemic. We now have more than 155,000 children availing of school transport, a 25% uplift since last year. This is very positive and so encouraging. Not only are we carrying more customers than ever before, a lot of the people we are surveying are more satisfied. We measure customer satisfaction four times a year and in the last four quarters, it has been over 91%.

I say all this because we could not do this without our people. Bus Éireann employs 2,800 people and we expect this to rise to 3,000 by the end of the year. Four in five are customer-facing and we currently have almost 2,100 drivers at 17 bases throughout the country. Our driver numbers are going to rise and we have a significant focus on recruitment to facilitate the expansion of Bus Éireann’s services. This growth is being driven by BusConnects in the regional cities, where we have already seen a lot of dialogue and consultations promising a increase in services of 50% and 75% and the Connecting Ireland regional mobility plan. We have already added more than two million annual kilometres to our network. This did not exist previously.

Key to all of this is attracting the right talent to support our culture of performance and strong customer focus. We are committed to ensuring our employees are rewarded with competitive pay, a pension scheme, essential training and continuous development, career progression opportunities, a national network of facilities, well-being programmes and employee-led social committees. Our vision for Bus Éireann is to be Ireland’s most customer-focused and sustainable transport company with people who believe in it as a great place to work. I am delighted that we have an engagement score of 74% across all employees, which gives a strong indication of how they feel about their employer. We have very low turnover among the driver grade - outside of retirements, we have an attrition rate of 4%. Because of our nationwide spread, Bus Éireann has the advantage of not having to recruit from one geographic area but we are not at all complacent. Our models show we need to attract up to 500 new drivers into the business in the next two years depending on the formalisation of the NTA’s plans.

We currently have 31 driver vacancies across the business but this figure is constantly changing. The important thing is to maintain a strong pipeline of applications. Our Ireland Needs Drivers campaign has been very successful. Last year, we filled 226 driver positions while in the first six months of this year, we have filled 217. We have a strong and collaborative relationship with the RSA and are aware that it is scaling up its resources to meet demand for testing and licensing.

With the very tight labour market, we are of course having to work harder to recruit. We have held 20 open days throughout the country and targeted advertising in key counties. We have put in place a programme to train drivers from B to D licences in Cork, Limerick and Dublin and I am delighted that over 70 trainees joined us through that programme so we are making very good progress.

Being a bus driver is rewarding. We see the difference they make and the important role they play in the lives of our customers every day. Enjoying that engagement with the public is very important. One of the concerns people may have about driving as a career is that there might be a lack of flexibility or they might be working at less family-friendly times but I am glad to say things have evolved. At Bus Éireann, we have positive working relationships with our employees’ representative bodies, the NBRU and SIPTU. We have brought in changed work practices offering much more flexibility and a fair distribution of weekend work by working with our union colleagues. We are even at the point of introducing a four-day week for drivers at certain locations.

We are very proud to have more than 45 nationalities working for Bus Éireann and diversity really matters to us but we are still heavily male dominated in the driver grades with only 4% of our drivers being female. We want to increase this number. We have a number of initiatives to address this including offering different work patterns. For example, we are seeing double the number of female recruits to "weekend only" positions. I know from talking to our employees that our best advertisement for women working at Bus Éireann are the women currently driving for us. They are very giving of their time in encouraging other women to consider a career in bus driving and when you talk to them, you can see how much they really love the job. Increasing female representation will not only benefit our recruitment but also our customers. I hope this sets the context for the committee. It is a very positive story and I am very pleased to be here to engage with the committee on any questions it may have.