Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

The last time I was on a bus, I had to give up my seat for a pregnant woman, so it works many ways. There is a crisis all around. The points made by Deputy Halligan are quite valid.

The Bill before the House is pretty technical. We are not dealing with anything revolutionary here. It is a means of facilitating bus rapid transit, with which I have an enormous problem. I am not really on for that. The other aspects of the Bill relate to relatively small technical matters such as taxis and airport fixed charge notices. Having said that, this debate gives us an important opportunity to stand back and look at the bigger picture. We have been treated to a plethora of announcements from the Minister regarding metro north, metro light, DART underground and DART extensions, etc. We have been told that the Luas is going there and not here. It has really been a case of announcement after announcement with very little clarity or detail about what is being done to develop an integrated transport system for our capital city, where a huge amount of the population lives and a larger amount of the population works. It is probably an illustration of the ad hocmishmash approach that is being taken. There was speculation over the summer that the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, was the only Minister in town. He was popping up in so many places that he seemed to be the only Minister who was working. While I think announcements are good, the lack of cohesion among the plethora of announcements is dangerous and worrying in some ways. Maybe I will elaborate on this point in a minute.

I will not repeat the points that have been made by Deputies Ellis and Boyd Barrett about taxis. When we are talking about regulation, we should note that taxi drivers feel they are super-regulated. There is an almighty level of scrutiny of taxi drivers and their efforts to earn their livelihoods. A similar level of scrutiny and regulation is not applied to those who operate as the competitors of taxi drivers, such as rickshaw drivers. Neither the National Transport Authority, Dublin City Council nor the Garda Síochána will take responsibility for regulating these operators, who are allowed to pick up passengers and operate more or less without any regulation whatsoever. There has to be a level playing field. The points that have been made about the pressures on taxi drivers who are trying to earn their livelihoods are still valid today. We need to be cognisant of that.

I would like to speak about the bus rapid transit issue, which has been spoken about at length. The idea of building rapid bus lanes on public roads to cater for this new type of bus seems to be the Minister's preferred choice of public transport. When that is added in with the shelving of the DART underground project, it is quite worrying, particularly following the axing of the metro north project - the real metro, the big metro, or whatever one wants to call it - in 2011. That project was not replaced in the recent announcements that were made. I suggest that the Government is still trying to untangle it. I am still not that clear on the matter. I suppose the first point is that buses are not a solution. The idea of developing bus services as a short-term solution is often used to avoid the longer-term infrastructure that is necessary.

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