Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minster. This unprecedented pandemic has stood much of our thinking on transport on its head. Three months ago, a single occupied vehicle in this city would have been frowned upon and, in fact, actively discouraged. Our investment in transport was to be concentrated on mass transport systems, transporting as many people as possible, as closely and densely packed as possible. How permanent this new attitude will be remains to be seen, but I do not think, and the Minister has said so himself, that things will not revert to pre-Covid 19 norms in their totality.

Fewer people will travel, more people will work from home and residual fears of close contact will probably exist for some considerable time to come, so our transport investment must be rethought but it also must be multifaceted. We should not have a knee-jerk reaction and think that all our mass transport systems can be simply scrapped, as some have suggested. We need to invest in walking, as others have said, in cycling, electric vehicles - again, bus, trains and trams. We need to invest in all of those areas but, right now, we need to address the task of moving our people back to work, our students back to school and our goods to and from our markets.

I want to pose four groups of questions and the Minister might respond quickly to each of them. The first is on our plan for getting people back to work and I have listened to him again on that. I have talked to operators and they do not know if there will be a significant return to work starting next week or how we will have that with the stock, the crews and capacities we have and applying social distancing.

The Minister spoke about masks. Who will bear the cost? I refer to a Wexford company, Wexford Bus. Very few passengers can be allowed now on its systems. It is losing money on each route it is now operating. In terms of my first question, in concrete and real terms, will the Minister underwrite the loss currently for private operators providing essential transport systems getting people back to work? How much, in real terms, will he provide for the CIÉ companies? He mentioned providing money in his contribution. How much will he provide and when will he give real written guarantees to them? The Minister might take a minute to answer that first question.

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