Ms Suzanne Armstrong:

The instance I was talking about was gardaí going home. It is if someone sees them flash their badge. Obviously if they get on in uniform it is great, but I have very rarely had that. On the responsiveness of the Garda, if I have to pull the bus over for antisocial behaviour I call control and then control calls the Garda, the offenders are gone and all the passengers are gone onto another bus. The Deputy was saying buses cannot turn up and this is why. Services are getting pulled. The only time I have ever had gardaí out - and they were out in less than 15 minutes, I would say - was the time I had a bike thrown under the bus. I had called control because obviously I could not move anywhere.

When the gardaí got there, I asked, "Did Dublin Bus ring you?". By pure coincidence, one of the gardaí who turned up was the daughter of the controller I was talking to. The gardaí said that it was not Dublin Bus but rather a resident who had called. I knew a bike had been thrown under the bus. I had stopped but I had hit it. The resident had called and said that a kid was on the bike and had gone under the bus. That is why the gardaí had arrived so quickly. Other than that, I could have been waiting a couple of hours. That is not the fault of the gardaí; there is just not enough of them.