Mr. Billy Hann:

The labour market for us is similar to that of our colleagues in Bus Éireann. As I said earlier, the main issue at the moment is not with drivers because we are getting a substantial number of people applying. The issue is largely with mechanics. As I said, we are having to look outside the State to see if we can bring people in. We will work closely with the Department on the critical skills list to ensure we can accommodate people as best we can. It is important to note we have 76 nationalities working in Dublin Bus, so we take people from outside the State.

The Deputy spoke about staff turnover. It has increased in recent years and is running at around 5% to 6%, but that is still very low for the transport sector and would be reflected in other sectors outside transport. The days of employees like Terry Clinton who are going to last 50 years in an organisation are probably well and truly gone. The younger generation tend to do their ten or 15 years, or maybe even fewer, and move on. That is something we all have to mitigate against.

As to our performance from a lost kilometres point of view, that was around 94.5% in 2022, approximately. We do not have quarter 2 figures for this year yet, but in quarter 1 it was up to 97%, so we are seeing an improvement in performance there. That is positive and is largely on the back of all the hard work Mr. Donohue and his team in HR have done on getting the resources in.