Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

On three occasions since January 2015, Bus Éireann brought forward plans to the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport which sought to address the issue of losses within the company, specifically within its Expressway operations. On each occasion, the Department delayed taking action. It is hardly a coincidence that the Department delayed action in 2015, in the run-up to the general election. Crisis measures at Bus Éireann would not have chimed well with the Fine Gael election mantra that we needed to keep the recovery going. Dither and delay were the name of the game, and that game was played for the short-term party political benefit of Fine Gael.

Anybody who ever read the Minister's columns in the Sunday Independentwill know he is an anti-union Minister. Meanwhile, Mr. Ray Hernan, the new boss at Bus Éireann, cut his corporate teeth at Ryanair, a company with a pronounced anti-union management ethos. On 11 January, in a letter to workers, Mr. Hernan said the threat of insolvency within 18 months was very real. On 25 January, he told an Oireachtas committee the company could be insolvent by the end of the year if losses continue. Clearly, Mr. Hernan is putting the issue of the shutdown of Bus Éireann on the agenda. This is a company that employs 2,600 workers. Leaving aside the cost of redundancy and social welfare payments for those workers and their families, the fact is they pay more than €50 million per year to the State in payroll taxes. Is the Minister for Finance prepared to forgo more than €50 million in annual tax revenues in order to allow the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport to refuse to intervene to save a public service that might cost the Exchequer €9 million in losses this year? These are the economics of the madhouse. They are Thatcherite policies and they make no sense whatsoever.

At the Oireachtas committee I gave the example of a friend of mine, John, who has been a bus driver with Bus Éireann for many years. I reported as to how John faces a cut of €136 per week from allowances he currently receives for driving on Sundays, performing overtime during the course of the week and driving a bus long distances out into the county of Cork. That man is facing a total of more than €6,500 per annum in cuts.

Bus Éireann workers and their unions have made it abundantly clear that they will take strike action rather than sit idly by and watch Mr. Hernan cut their pay by thousands of euro per annum. If I were an Iarnród Éireann worker or a Dublin Bus worker, I would not be prepared to stand idly by either and allow the Bus Éireann workers to be beaten up on knowing that my direct colleagues and I could very well be next. A national transport strike is implicit in the current situation given the level of provocation taking place.

Every trade union and every worker in the land has a vested interest in ensuring a precedent for massive wage cuts is not set in this example. An injury to one is an injury to all and that is as true today as it was in the days of James Connolly and Big Jim Larkin.

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