Ms Dervla McKay:

I thank the Leas-Chathaoirleach. A couple of our Dublin commuter services were affected. A small number of vehicles were essentially trapped on the north quays for quite some time. Thankfully both the vehicles and our colleagues were able to come out of the area in the early hours of the morning. One of our coaches was painted with some graffiti but relative to some of our fellow operators, we were fortunate, which perhaps is the wrong choice of words, but it certainly could have been much worse.

We suspended services short of the city quite early on in the evening and as the situation was developing, and information was that the situation was still not under control, we started to suspend services throughout at around 10:30 p.m., when we started bring the services back. It was then very much about ensuring that as things calmed down, that we had the confirmation that the city was indeed safe again to be in operation. I have to say that our team worked tirelessly through the night to ensure that the next day we did not miss a beat. I am thinking particularly about those colleagues who may have been uncertain about coming into work the next day. They very much pulled together. I believe it was Deputy Matthews who said earlier that with regard to running public transport services, no one goes in with the intention of not operating a service, or not operating it well, and that was very much true last Thursday night and into the early hours of Friday morning, when everybody did pull together. On Friday, the services ran really well.