Mr. Billy Hann:

It is a challenge to get resources in a full employment market, particularly drivers and mechanics, as the Deputy referred to. From a Dublin Bus perspective, we have been very active in our recruitment campaigns for the past number of years. We have recruited over 1,000 drivers since January 2022. We have 89 different nationalities in our organisation. Staff are not just Irish nationals. Recruitment remains a challenge going forward. We are recruiting at a rate of over 400 people a year at the moment. We are going out to South Africa later this month to look at recruiting drivers from there, preferably people with D licences. We had to open up recruitment to B licence drivers in Ireland who take longer to train, which is more expensive. We had to do that to get the numbers in.

That is what we are doing from a drivers' perspective. From the mechanics' perspective, again there are real challenges with skills and tradespeople. This is not confined to mechanics but relates to tradespeople across various industrial sectors in this country. Dublin Bus is no different. We have had to go international to get fully qualified mechanics into the system. We started in Spain and brought in eight mechanics approximately two years ago. We brought in over 40 Filipino mechanics last year. We are currently recruiting another 20-plus mechanics from the Philippines. Some of them came over in the past couple of weeks. That is what we are having to do to bring mechanics in.

We recognise that there is a responsibility on us to have home-grown mechanics as well. We have bolstered our apprenticeship system in recent times and have over 80 apprentices in our system. As we know, an apprenticeship system delivers over a four-year period because it takes four years to qualify. Those apprentices will start to come out of the system next year. Numbers in the apprenticeship system are as high as they have ever been and our recruitment is quite strong to meet the demands of business-as-usual expansion and for BusConnects.