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

Most people would welcome more frequent buses on main bus corridors, cycling infrastructure, orbital routes and so on. In many other areas, however, this plan should not be called BusConnects but "BusDisconnects". We have engaged with people in our communities about this. I have a list of the 2,700 submissions we have so far collected from people who are furious, worried, anxious and angry at plans to remove local bus services in a way that will particularly hit the elderly, the less mobile and working-class areas. Route No. 4, which serves Stradbrook and Blackrock, is gone altogether, leaving that area with a replacement bus service that will not go into the city centre and will be half as frequent. Bus services direct into the city from Ballybrack, Loughlinstown and Sallynoggin are gone altogether. People will have to go to Dún Laoghaire and change to another bus there, which still will not go into O'Connell Street but will stop at Merrion. The No. 63 will be replaced by a less frequent service in the Monkstown Farm area, which has already lost the 46A service, which used to go every ten minutes. Dalkey will lose 50% of its bus service because the 111 and the 59 will be replaced by another service that will be half as frequent. In particular, people who need to get to St. Vincent's Hospital will no longer have a direct bus route from a whole number of inland areas such as Sallynoggin, Loughlinstown, Ballybrack and so on.

This is why we say this is a Trojan horse for privatisation. What the privatisers want is routes that make a lot of money on a high-frequency basis and to cut the public service routes into areas serving high numbers of pensioners and people with mobility issues. That is not acceptable and will be resisted. There have been huge turnouts at meetings, huge numbers signing petitions saying we want to retain our public bus services. Yes, we should have high-frequency and orbital routes, but they should be additional to existing services. There should be no cuts to existing services. We also need to increase public transport subsidies to the level of the European average if we want to improve our bus services. By the way, let us cut bus fares as well to encourage greater use of our public transport system.

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