Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for coming in and raising these incredibly important issues. At the heart of the matter they are about driver safety and public safety. We are seeing a long overdue and much-needed investment in public transport in recent years. We could do with getting more into public transport, but there has certainly been a big increase in investment in public transport. However, it is pointless if no one is going to use it and no one is going to use it if they do not feel safe. There has been discussion at this committee of the huge issues with reliability of services and staffing has been pointed to as one of the issues with reliability. We are never going to be able to have reliable services or expand services if we cannot retain staff because they do not feel safe or if people will not join in the first place because they feel it will not be safe. For all sorts of reasons we need to make that modal shift to public transport, but it is only going to happen if drivers and customers feel safe. Anything we do to improve SIPTU members' safety is going to impact on improving the customers' safety. I welcome the investment by this Green Minister but we need to start investing in the safety of drivers and the general public.

I want to explore a couple of things. I apologise for being late, but Ms Armstrong was mentioning something as I was coming in. She talked about the garda getting on, flashing their ID and the benefit of having that uniformed officer. That speaks to the need for the transport police she was talking about. How does that work? Is that ad hoc, planned, or does it depend on the local gardaí?

I have several questions so I will throw them all out and let the witnesses come back. Ms Armstrong also talked about the protocol of calling through to control looking for help. I have talked to people about buses being stopped because of antisocial behaviour and everyone is told to get off while the driver waits for the gardaí. They talk about it impacting on services, but I am curious about the response of the Garda. Is it quick enough and is it sufficient? I will ask those two for the minute and come back to the other ones afterwards.