Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I come back to the Minister to have that discussion about the more Wicklow-related transport. One of the Minister's statements in his submission was that he believed emissions have peaked and the ship is turning. On what evidence is he basing that statement? I acknowledge there have been improvements, and as I have repeatedly said, Local Link is an incredible service and I would love to see it in every town and village running every half an hour or 15 minutes doing loops of all these areas. It is just incredible and I would love to see major investment in that. However, I worry that there is a big gap between what the Minister believes, that is, that the ship is turning, and what is being seen on the ground. I will use Wicklow as an example because, being my constituency, it is the one with which I most familiar.

In Wicklow, there are 58,715 people travelling to work in the county every day. The majority of them drive to work. Some 37,311 people drive to work by car, 2,568 go by bus, and 2,717 go by train. Therefore, we can see there is an enormous number of people who are still using private cars to get to work. That is not because they necessarily want to use a private car to get to work. The issue is not with demand but with supply. With any issues raised with me when it comes to transport in Wicklow, it is always the case that people are screaming for better, more reliable, and more frequent services and it is not being provided at a pace quick enough, not only to meet our climate objectives but even to meet the increase in population in the county. There is major potential for improvements there.

I will specifically talk about buses. The BusConnects plan for Bray and Greystones was first mooted in 2018. I have recently received information from the NTA that this would be put in place by the end of quarter 2 this year, which is fantastic and will make a huge difference, but that is an incredibly long time to wait, essentially for a number of Local Link loop buses and a couple of other improvements. The pace just is not there. We repeatedly have issues with the 133, the 131, and the 84 bus services. There is not enough capacity on all the bus services we have. We have instances of them driving by people standing at the bus stops. We are always seeing these problems and until that is resolved we are not going to encourage people into buses and out of their cars. That is the context when it comes to buses.