James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

From the outset, I apologise to the Minister, the clerk and my Oireachtas colleagues, because I just caught up at another meeting. I want to start off by agreeing with the points made by Deputy Kenny and the Minister around what happened last Thursday in Dublin, which was appalling. As part of the violence on O’Connell Street and other areas of the city, public transport infrastructure was targeted. Needless damage was done to public infrastructure that each and every one of us relies on in our daily lives. It is for getting to and from our places of work. It is for children going to and from their places of education. It is for university and higher education students getting to and from their places of education. From the outset, we must strongly condemn what happened. I welcome the statement in that regard and I wish to be associated with other comments made.

One key finding from Thursday is how, through the allocation of funding, we can create a better system to warn the public transport operators of Dublin Bus and the Luas, which had been caught up in this situation, about the potential outbreak of violence like this.

We are very lucky in Ireland that this type of thing does not occur that often. Is there a system in place, if a similar situation occurs, to instruct drivers of buses and Luas tram operators to evacuate an area? We saw the tensions boil during the day and what took place has resulted in millions of euro worth of damage. I understand hybrid buses cost in the region of €600,000 and it will take a while to establish the full cost of the damage to the Luas tram. I am conscious about how we can improve our capacity to react to situations appropriately. On Thursday, for the drivers and staff involved, it must have been an horrific situation. As I said, occurrences like this have been incredibly rare in our recent history and decades go by without an occurrence of such violence, which we are very cognisant of, but I get the impression that on O'Connell Street that night, for a number of hours, it was a very precarious situation for the Dublin Bus workers, the Luas tram operators and any passengers on board. Once again, I reiterate that violence on our streets is a very rare event.