Mr. Brendan O'Brien:

At present we provide quite a lot of bus and coach parking in the city centre. As the Deputy says, it is not enough. We are committed to providing more and better bus stops at various different locations. We have been working with Dublin Bus over the years to take away much of the on-street parking in the city centre, which is an ineffective use of space, and we have been identifying other locations where parking can take place. We do not want buses to be laying over in the city centre because that is not an effective use of the space. For example, for the coaches beside us here on Nassau Street, we have introduced the 30-minute turnaround, thus avoiding a coach parking up all day and occupying that space.

With a lot of space in the city centre, we want it to be used productively. As we grow through this, as part of the city centre study we had identified a number of hubs in the city centre that we wanted to focus on, namely, Heuston Station, Connolly Station and D'Olier Street, to start to bring together the different services such as the Luas, the bus and DART services and make it a much more coherent interchange. That is part of what the city centre study was about. It was to look at the disparate way that we use transport at present and try to bring them together.

As for providing a lot of coach parking in the city centre, for example, we have a lot of coach parking and bus parking on Merrion Square but get a lot of criticism for the use of the square for that purpose. In the city centre, we prefer to provide the stops to have passenger turnover quite quickly, as in the case of the coach park which is a first step in this regard. The idea of the coach park is that passengers can be dropped and the coach can go off, can wait and can come back to collect them rather than stop on the city centre street and occupy it, for example, for a number of hours. That is the key point there. I accept the point that in the city centre we are short of space but we are trying to maximise it. A fast turnover of buses at stops is a key element for us.