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

The difficulty we have is that we are constrained by the public health advice, which is based on the assessment of the need to reduce the amount of contact among the population. Under the level 5 restrictions, bus services are reduced to 25% capacity. That is the real difficulty. We are reviewing the situation on an ongoing basis but any change must be agreed by the public health officials and they do not want to change the rules and standards in the middle of a period of restrictions at a particular level.

As I said, there was a particular problem with bus services in the first few days of the level 5 restrictions when the numbers of buses in operation reduced. The numbers have been rising again in recent days. The Deputy is relating what people are experiencing as they go about their daily lives. Drivers have a certain amount of discretion as to whom they allow to board their buses but we do not want to put the whole of that huge responsibility on them. They have to make a call and we will back up the drivers in whatever approach they take. We have discussed other options with the NTA and other ways of making this very difficult situation better. There is no easy solution other than possibly going back to NPHET and agreeing a different public health approach. That is not an easy thing to do at this time. We will look at the bus transport situation as part of the ongoing review of level 5 restrictions. There may be an opportunity at the interim review to change things.

There is a further issue to consider when we come out of level 5, when even the 50% capacity limit will present real difficulties as we start to return to normal. We are a slight outlier in Europe in that we probably have more restrictive measures in place than is the case in other countries. A lot of the safety issues surrounding public transport are to do with the level of mask-wearing. Compliance in this regard is pretty universal in our case. Another factor is how passengers behave and manage their own safety. Again, most people in this country are very conscious of the issues and are acting in a way that is very sensible. The review we are doing will be concerned not just with what we are doing at the current level of restrictions, which in the case of public transport involve a 25% capacity limit, but what we can do when we get back to levels 2 and 3, where we will probably find that the 50% limit is causing difficulties.

We do not want people to leave public transport completely. At the same time, we want to do the right thing in public health safety terms. That is the difficult balance we have to get right.

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