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

I met some of those County Galway private bus operators last summer and the Deputy is absolutely right that they run a first-class service. The really annoying thing is that just before Covid struck they were actually seeing a massive expansion in their services. They were looking at new routes like east-west, north-south and a whole range of different ones. They were finding that as soon as they put new routes on, customer demand was rising to meet them; they were on a big expansion plan. I hope we can get back to that.

A connected issue with respect to what we must do in transport to have a low-emissions future is in our roads programme, which will still be significant. Our public transport programme will be bigger and be enhanced but it is also important we maintain roads and build new roads to get over where we have pinch points and problems. As we look at this climate plan, I have been saying that within the roads programme, we must really focus on bypasses of towns, and a large number of them. They do not have to be big motorways or huge expensive projects. We can spend our money wisely and have it go further and be spent more widely by doing a whole series of small bypasses. These will often be single carriageway but they will get traffic out of the bottleneck. If buses must go into town to pick up passengers that is fine but if they do not, they will not be stuck in traffic. That is also going to be important for the bus system. We need to go with lots of bypasses.

See this speech in context