Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to follow Deputy Seamus Healy because he represents Clonmel which, in public transport terms, is a hugely historic and important town. Bianconi had the laborious job of carrying picture frames around rural Ireland to sell and he saw rich people flying by in their coaches and resoled to set up one that would carry everyone. He did that and his first route was from Clonmel to Limerick.

It stopped in Carrigavantry and the Glen of Aherlow, which was the first stop, and then every 20 miles. He ended up with a system which was the Ryanair of its day, except it had a bit more class in terms of how everyone was catered for. The service went as far as Belmullet and was then all over the country. It was an integrated public transport system. We should be looking what Bianconi did and we should create a new network.

We have a real crisis at present in Bus Éireann but the solution cannot just be sticking to the existing system. We need to put more money into public transport, but we should use the opportunity to change the entire system and create a new and much more extensive network. We must be ambitious and think like Bianconi in terms of what we could do, particularly for rural Ireland which is disadvantaged because it does not have any real functioning public transport system compared to what we might want if we had a Bianconi vision for this world.

As I understand it, the real problem in Bus Éireann at the present time concerns the competition between private operators that are allowed to run from city to city on motorways and Bus Éireann's competing service which is much slower because stops must be made in a number of towns along the way. The answer in creating this new network is to turn that into an advantage by ensuring that there is an integrated mesh network. This would mean that the alternative bus that is stopping off at towns en route would be able to pick up passengers all along the way and would, thus, become profitable because it would have that source of custom to which a point-to-point city bus does not have access. The way to achieve that is to examine some of the other State services and systems and connect them together to pull other passengers in.

One obvious example which has been tested in other countries and which works would be to see if we can use An Post and Bus Éireann together. For example, postal vans which deliver parcels to rural Ireland could become dual-function vehicles and could be used to carry passengers also. We would then begin to have an interconnected system which would be flexible. An Post needs a big investment to make that happen, but it is on the point of real change. Their mail business is going, so they have to develop a parcel delivery system and other systems.

Why not think big and ambitiously in this national planning framework we are about to put in place? Rather than considering this as a crisis and asking how we can keep the current system going, we should think differently and consider connecting all those towns to which I refer. It could involve other services. We are spending €50,000 a day on taxis for the health service. Could we get them to be part of this integrated network system? Some school buses are still only used for school hours and are empty in the middle of the day.

We should also connect with the private sector so that when the Bus Éireann bus arrives in a town, if there is a private operator going in the opposite direction from that town, there should be an integrated ticketing system. We should have the same system as at bus stops in Dublin whereby people can see real-time information on when the next bus is coming. People will then know they can make a connection. We must create a meshed rural public transport system that works. That needs investment and it may mean that we will not spend so much money on roads. We will instead start spending on public transport that will use those roads first and foremost.

Let us be like Bianconi and think big. Let us have a service from Clonmel to Belmullet stopping at all points in between and starting at the centre of the world, Carrigavantry, where my family had one of the first stage posts - they later turned it into a pub - that took in Bianconi's horses . I am very proud of this.

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