Mr. Brendan Crowley:

The Coach Tourism and Transport Council of Ireland is the country's largest representative body for commercial bus operators. We are a proactive organisation focused on delivering efficient and sustainable transport connectivity in Ireland. Although the public transport sector plays a vital role in Irish society, it is supported every day by our members in the private sector. In essence, we help to keep Ireland connected.

As a sector, we support more than 11,000 jobs across every constituency and region in Ireland and our activities have sustained businesses across all the areas where our scheduled routes operate, as well as carrying out school transport services. The commercial bus and coach industry has approximately 1,800 licensed operators in Ireland. We support businesses across rural Ireland that would otherwise have limited employment opportunities, while the entire sector generates more than €620 million for the economy annually. The commercial bus industry undertakes 75 million passenger journeys every year across scheduled services, school transport and coach tourism. We are here today to discuss rural transport and essential connectivity for these communities, including both the challenges and opportunities facing the sector.

Many of our members have for years been engaged in the delivery of rural public transport on a commercial basis. In the vast majority of cases, these services were developed where there was little or no alternative, thus filling a vital role in terms of community connectivity and social cohesion. Today, we continue to provide and support, both directly and indirectly, valuable employment across our country. All of these services have been developed without financial support from the State.

In recent years, many of these services have come under pressure due to the Connecting Ireland rural mobility plan. As the Connecting Ireland network, largely made up of Local Link services, continues to develop, there is far greater potential for indirect competition for passengers where services overlap or operate in very close proximity to one another. The commercial realities are that the lower fares and often higher frequency of the Government-funded services cannot be matched by licensed operators and, therefore, the future of many of these services is in severe doubt. I want to make it clear that we are fully supportive of the Connecting Ireland plan. In fact, many of those services are provided by our members through NTA contracts, thus providing reliable revenue streams that have allowed significant investment in a modern bus fleet across the country. However, while this is all positive, we are concerned that there is an urgent need for the State to devise a fair and transparent process to manage the transition of services that are destabilised or no longer financially viable from licensed services to become part of the publicly supported network.

Successive budgets have contained measures to reduce the cost of fares on public transport. We very much welcome any measures designed to encourage people to use bus services. Our members, who provide regular, reliable services on hundreds of licensed routes, have for many years participated in the Department of Social Protection free travel scheme. We have also participated in the young adult fare scheme since it was launched in 2022. For reasons unknown to us, we have been excluded from the under-nines free travel initiative. Considering that our members provide many rural services as well as urban services in towns and cities across the country, we believe that the exclusion of commercial services from this scheme unfairly disadvantages thousands of families and children as the cost of living problems continue. Furthermore, it undermines the efforts to change consumer behaviours and deter the use of private vehicles, something that would have obvious positive impacts on driving Ireland’s emissions down. We estimate the cost of including the private commercial network at less than €1 million per annum from a Department of Transport budget that was €3.9 billion in 2025. It is also important to note that the benefit of inclusion accrues to the end user - the hard-pressed passengers and parents - and not the companies. The technology to enable inclusion is already in place through the Leap card operating system and our members are ready and willing to work with the NTA team to implement these changes should the Minister for Transport amend the policy in this regard.

We welcome the allocation of €83 million for the decarbonisation of commercial bus fleets contained in budget 2026. We look forward to hearing in greater detail about how this funding will be distributed, and whether moneys will be ring-fenced to encourage the transition for bus operators. However, given what we know about the high costs of transition, multiples of this allocation will be required in the coming years. To make investments in electric vehicles more viable, we must see a situation where the duration of contracts, such as Local Link contracts, is extended beyond the current four years.

In our pre-budget submission, we proposed that consideration be given to using HVO as a transitional fuel that would reduce life-cycle carbon emissions by over 90%. This could have been made possible through a diesel to HVO equalisation measure. Unfortunately, our wish was not granted on this occasion and instead we have been hit by an increase in carbon tax to our diesel costs.

The CTTC members have a long history of developing and delivering reliable rural public transport services.

Now, at a time of heightened public investment, customer expectations and demand for services, we are committed to working with all stakeholders to deliver a network that could be a source of national pride. All we ask in return is that we be considered and treated as equal partners and that the contribution of our members and challenges faced by our operators should be acknowledged. We would like more proactive engagement with the Minister and the Department of Transport to overcome these challenges on a fair basis. In essence, we want to be a partner with the Government and the Oireachtas on this important issue.