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

If the Minister wants to avoid major disruption to hundreds of thousands of people over the May Day bank holiday weekend and prevent workers, who do not want to be on strike, from going on strike tomorrow, he should abandon this crazy plan to privatise 10% of the routes of Bus Éireann and Dublin Bus. A lot of mud has been thrown and confusion sown on this issue but the bottom line is that this is the beginning of an ideologically driven attempt to privatise bus services. The consequence of that will be to assault the pay and conditions of bus workers and to adversely affect the public transport system as a public service for those who need it. Essentially, what this Government is about is making public transport a purely profit-oriented business. That is absolutely retrograde and should be abandoned.

My own area will be devastated by the first round of privatisation. Six routes are affected, namely 75, 45A, 59, 62, 17 and 114. What characterises many, though not all, of those routes is that they serve areas that are a little bit off the beaten track and where many elderly and young people live. They would not necessarily be hugely profitable routes and if this plan goes ahead these routes will be lost, sooner or later. There is no way for private companies to make money from such routes other than by cutting the routes, reducing the service or attacking the pay and conditions of their workers. The problem with public transport in this country is simple. We provide one of the lowest subsidies to public transport in Europe at 29%; it is 39% in London, 57% in Zurich, 79% in Lyon, 68% in Brussels and so forth. That is the basic problem; we are underfunding public transport in order to force it towards privatisation. We should abandon that plan and avert the strike tomorrow.

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