Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

Why pay €400,000 to a consultant to create a re-jigging of existing bus routes and dress it up as being something more frequent? The Minister has said this will ease congestion. That means getting people out of cars. Why would people get out of cars to get two buses rather than one? It makes no sense. In the case of my own area, which is obviously a pattern from what others have been saying, we will be losing direct buses such as the 70 from Dunboyne and Littlepace. Corduff and Mulhuddart will lose the 38A route into the city centre and we will also lose the 40D from Tyrrelstown. That is to be re-routed to one of the busiest shopping centres in the entire country, which will be congested on Saturdays, over the Christmas period and so on.

It has been said that it will be more frequent. What has not been said is how many extra buses will be there to cater for all the extra people who are now joining their friends from other communities to fight for the extra spaces at the interchange. People in greater Blanchardstown should not be begging to keep their three direct buses into the city. We should have a light rail system and a Luas from Broombridge. We are a community of 110,000 people with some of the biggest multinational companies bringing about 25,000 people into the area every day, none of whom seem to think there is any onus on them to provide any extra public transport to cater for those workers.

I do not make any apologies for organising meetings. It is amazing that one of the Labour speakers spent time whinging and whining about people organising meetings. The reality is that people made what they thought crystal clear to us. They are not stupid. They know they are losing buses and are not going to put up with it. We will not wait for a few months. We are directing people to engage in the consultation to make their views very clear but we need a strong community campaign to send a clear message to the NTA that this will not be acceptable.

I agree that this is about privatisation - be it of the spine or orbital routes or cutting Dublin Bus off from even having local routes - but either way, it has increased isolation for many communities. People do not want to get off a bus once they are on one. Nobody wants to do that, particularly if they have impaired mobility or are older. Why would anyone want to do so in weather such as ours? We know that there are people, in Fianna Fáil in particular, organising meetings to put their faces on posters but they are the architects of privatisation. This is definitely linked with the Minister's plan for privatisation. Only this week, 10% of buses were taken off Dublin Bus and given to Go-Ahead Ireland. Workers' salaries and conditions are far worse. It is a Fine Gael agenda. None of the lessons from Great Britain has been learned. A very similar policy was pursued there under the Thatcher government that opened up the bus market to competition and privatised the national bus company. It has resulted in unprofitable services being run down. We must subsidise public transport. It cannot just make a profit: otherwise communities will be left bereft. Many people have been left without transport in London as a result and fares have skyrocketed so the idea that this is not linked with privatisation is very hard to believe since the Minister is such an admirer of the Ryanair model.

This is about political pressure because the Minister does have the legal power to direct the NTA in legislation to stop a proposal. This proposal does not serve communities in any way. There have been meetings attended by 400 or 500 people in Greenhills and many other areas. People have a right to have their say.

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