Marian Harkin (Sligo-Leitrim, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to support the motion to make public transport free and accessible. It is certainly ambitious but I believe its time has come. The Minister of State said we cannot afford it and suggested it does not work as well as they thought it might elsewhere. The argument of not being able to afford something is not a good argument if the objective is positive. I will come back to that later. We are in a crisis at the moment and sometimes a crisis is an opportunity to do things differently and look at things differently. We are not just in one crisis; we are in two. We have the cost-of-living crisis and the climate change crisis. These two crises coming together favour many of the proposals in the motion. While the programme for Government might not have been in favour of free universal public transport, now is the time to consider it. I will come back to that later.

The motion is ambitious but surely its time has come. The Government is not opposing it, which is itself a recognition that what is contained and asked for in it is largely reasonable, doable and a good policy proposal. I thank Deputy Pringle for giving us an opportunity to debate and tease out some of his ideas. There are a lot of really good ideas in it . Some, perhaps, will take longer to put in place than others. However, all of them are good proposals in their own right. We have an opportunity this morning to discuss some of them. It is ambitious but it gets many of these policy proposals right, especially in the context of the cost-of-living crisis, the need to cut our CO2 and other emissions and, crucially, the need to ensure all public transport is accessible.

When most people hear the word "accessibility", they think about somebody in a wheelchair, somebody who has very poor mobility or somebody who suffers from sight loss or whatever. They think of a person with a disability. In truth, access is so much more than this. Access is about universal design. It is not about people with disabilities. Access is for everyone. Sometimes there is the idea that there is them and us - there are the people who have disabilities and, God, we need to do something about it, and then there is us, and we can get on with our daily lives. The reality of life is that many of us will become "them" as we age, as our mobility may be compromised. Universal design deals with that issue for all of us from birth to death. There should not be any question about this. It should be the way we do our business. Whether it is our buildings or our transport infrastructure, we must now and for the future ensure universal design. That is what this motion is asking for in broad terms. It is going in the right direction, and I know the Minister of State will agree with me. We have signed up to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD. That requires us to take the universal design approach. Whether it is our buildings or transport infrastructure, this is a whole-of-population approach and it needs to be embedded in all our designs. Accessibility should be a given. We often speak of independent living. All of us have independent living. It is crucial to the lives of persons with a disability. We think in terms of access to buildings or services. However, it is also about freedom of movement, the kind of movement that, for now at least, the Minister of State and I and most people in the Chamber take for granted. The motion is asking us to put that policy at the centre of where we move from here on public transport. The current situation whereby sometimes 24 hours' notice needs to be given has to change. I am not saying it will be changed by tomorrow because that takes time. The change should be as immediate as possible for all public transport. Private transport may take a little longer. I am not letting those providers off the hook or excusing them. Everybody has a business to run and has to look at costs. The sooner it becomes embedded as the way we do and think about things, the better.

I want to briefly comment on the issue of rural transport. Sometimes the sentiment is that rural people are wedded to their cars. That is not true. The practical issue for many people who live in rural areas is that if they do not have a car, they cannot move about. Rural people want public transport just as much as anybody who lives in an urban area. It has to be affordable. Reduction in our use of CO2 is key. It needs to be frequent, accessible and cheap. My colleague, Deputy Pringle, is looking for it to be free and I support him fully. However, there are steps along that way that we can take. I recognise that Government has decreased fares for certain sectors and so on. That decrease needs to be across the board for everybody.

It is not enough for transport to be frequent, accessible and cheap; it needs to be integrated. Online ticketing can be a nightmare. Someone who decides to book the night before to get a better price can only activate that 90 minutes before the bus arrives in rural Ireland and, I presume, elsewhere. They might have no Internet coverage when they get to the bus stop. The whole system is not working well enough as a system for people to be confident in using it to deal with their transport issues. There is also an issue about it being integrated.

I have received numerous emails from people who travel from small, rural parishes or villages into their local town. There might be a bus service twice a day that brings them to their local town but when they arrive they find that the main bus services to elsewhere have left five or ten minutes earlier. There needs to be integrated thinking about the provision of rural transport.

The Minister of State mentioned a rail review and improving train services in the north west. Deputy Pringle and I are well aware that the rail review does not include the word “Donegal”, unless there is a new one that I am not aware of. The county needs to be included if anybody is seriously thinking about ensuring we have a rail service. Deputy Pringle will confirm I am right in saying Donegal is one of the few counties in the country, perhaps the only one, that does not have a train service. Perhaps there is one other. There needs to be a commitment to that. The current rail review will not do it.

Free public transport would be a boost to everybody, especially in the current cost-of-living crisis. The Government's proposals for young people are not enough. This needs to be universal.

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