Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

It is fair to say that the transport sector has been one of the most impacted by the Covid crisis. During the lockdown, buses, trains and trams ran regularly, but were virtually empty, to ensure there was transport for essential workers. During this time, there was almost no income coming in for the operators. While a subvention under the public service obligation was allocated for the sector in the last budget, it certainly will not be enough to cover that loss of income. Will the Minister indicate how the allocation for 2020 will be handled and what amount of money will be given? After the lockdown, the advice from NPHET was to practise social distancing on buses, trains and trams, which is having an ongoing impact on revenues. I am sure there will be something to address this in the budget next month. Private transport providers who operate on a wholly commercial basis are being impacted by the Covid restrictions in the same way as those operators that are funded from the levy.

Dublin Bus usually alters its timetables when schools return but it has not done so this year because it has not received the necessary funding from the NTA to do so. This is creating very significant problems, not for millions of people but certainly for a cohort. It needs to be addressed because it is leading to a lot of additional and needless traffic around schools.

I do not need to tell the Minister that we are playing catch-up when it comes to sustainable transport provision and encouraging cycling and walking. There has been a good investment in that area this year, in addition to the funding that was provided last year. It is really important that we know what outcome we will get from that funding. It is not necessarily buckets of white paint we need but decent networks. An audit of the funding is required. Change needs to be delivered not in a fragmented way but through planning incrementally, which is a different thing entirely, so that we end up with a network at the end of it.

We had a debate in the House in recent weeks on the situation of small public service vehicle operators. There is no doubt that there are significant problems as a consequence of the loss of tourism, restrictions on the entertainment sector and the numbers of people previously working in towns and cities who are now working at home. There is a real difficulty for people making a living in that sector and there is no clear end in sight.

As an island nation on the edge of Europe, we will be even more exposed from January next year when Brexit happens. Both airports and seaports are a big issue in this context, just as they are in regard to Covid. A task force was set up by the previous Minister to examine this issue and there has been some criticism that its recommendations were not implemented.

It was a snapshot and we have a better idea now that this is going to be a much longer-term issue. How we protect public health while at the same time managing the aviation sector is a big challenge. For example, many international airports have testing facilities and we do not yet. The Minister might address what part that might play. We have now moved to a green list, which we are told is the real green list. Is it intended to introduce a red list and even more controls? We cannot take a risk but, at the same time, this is an important sector. According to the aviation recovery task force, the key numbers from Oxford Economics indicate that the estimated GDP contribution of air transport to Ireland was €8.9 million. A total of 140,000 jobs were supported by the aviation sector and the estimated GDP contribution of foreign tourists was €8.7 billion. If we remember back to the period following the previous crash, the tourism sector was the one that started to deliver in terms of a recovery. While we cannot look at that with any degree of certainty at this stage, we have to ensure we end up with a viable aviation sector post-Covid. Having listened to representatives of the aviation sector at the Covid committee, I do not see how that can happen without an injection of funds to the sector. Setting it up again is going to be very different for the Minister than scaling up a sector that is underperforming for all the reasons we know about. I would like to hear what the Minister has to say about that sector. In 2018, domestic tourism made a contribution of €3.3 billion to the economy, which is a significant amount, but foreign visitors contributed almost three times that.

Our ports are also going to be challenged. I have had the benefit of visiting Dublin Port to look at the initiatives it has taken. What they have done is very impressive and going out there to look at the level of preparedness was very worthwhile. However, other ports require attention if we are to see the traffic as something we can distribute in a much more equal way. The Minister might address those few questions in his response.

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