Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

If the Minister does not, it seems he should.

Will the Minister meet the users of bus services - pensioners, those with disabilities, young people, and so on - who have been affected by these cuts and they will explain what is going on. If he met them, he would discover that the line being spun by Dublin Bus is disingenuous and akin to the logic of the United States in the Vietnam war that we must destroy our bus services in order to save and improve them. The Minister should take that back to Dublin Bus and do something about a situation where elderly persons in this city are being made prisoners in their homes because their bus services are being withdrawn. One does not improve bus services by taking 200 buses out of the Dublin Bus fleet.

Has the Minister read the Deloitte report? The Deloitte report points out that the Government provides a lower level of subvention for public transport than most of its European counterparts. It does not recommend cutting the number of buses in the bus service, but under the language of so-called reform and streamlining, cuts are what are happening.

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