Ms Anne Graham:

Just to put public safety on public transport in context, we carry out annual surveys of sentiment of those who use these services. Of the people who travel on public transport, 95% deem their transport to be safe or fairly safe. That is a high level of satisfaction with safety, notwithstanding that there have been significant and distressing incidents on public transport at different times of the day and at night. We were happy to see that in general public transport users feel their systems are safe. Much work is done between ourselves and An Garda Síochána. We work very closely with the force to try to put in place activities that will ensure people feel even safer on public transport and that operators and their staff have the opportunity to access An Garda Síochána when they need to at all times of the day. We are very satisfied that An Garda Síochána has been very responsive in this matter.

It is still distressing, however, to see that some horrific incidents can occur. These do not necessarily occur late at night. We have seen some of the more significant incidents happen in the early evening and not late at night. We must take this point into consideration. We can only see what is happening on our existing 24-hour services, which have been well received and are being used by large numbers of people. We have, in fact, had difficulty meeting the demand for these services. When customers are using our services, this is a good sign that they feel those services are safe or fairly safe. When those services are busy as well, that has a natural way of reducing the feeling of not being safe on a public transport system. We cannot therefore really know whether the extension of licensing hours will have an impact in terms of further antisocial behaviour on public transport. This has not been the evidence up to now, but this would obviously have to be something we would be taking into account when we are seeking to plan for additional 24-hour services. I refer to whether additional security and access to Garda resources may be needed even more for these services.