Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Independent Group for tabling this important motion. People Before Profit strongly agrees with the introduction of free and frequent public transport and has campaigned for it for a number of years. We have budgeted for it in all of our budget submissions in recent years. Despite the Government's claim that it is committed to trying to address the climate crisis and reduce car use, it is resisting introducing what is an obvious measure, that being, making public transport free and frequent. Public transport has to be both. The lack of decent public transport blights rural Ireland to a great extent, leaving many people isolated and without services, but it is also something that affects us here in Dublin and elsewhere in urban Ireland.

Besides an immediate move to free public transport, I will make two suggestions. First, we have a great deal of windfall money from our corporate tax receipts. Some of that should be invested in purchasing social and affordable housing, but another large chunk of it should be used as a one-off capital investment to expand the national bus fleet considerably. This is obvious. Our fleet lacks capacity. We can see that where schoolchildren and rural Ireland are concerned. Expanding our public transport fleet would be money well spent. I urge the Government to do this and to buy electric buses, not only as part of the climate transition, but also to provide services for people.

Second, we need to abandon the stealth privatisation of public transport. One of the reasons for buses not turning up is that, as part of the competitive tendering out of routes and privatisation of public transport, these companies - Go-Ahead Ireland in particular - cannot recruit and retain enough bus drivers. The only thing that private operators can do to try to get in on a route is to drive down labour costs and labour conditions. It is a race to the bottom in terms of the treatment of bus drivers and other bus workers. This flows directly from the competitive tendering out of routes and means that people do not want to work as bus drivers any more. If we want to build the public transport capacity that we need, we must abandon the competitive privatisation of routes, renationalise the entire public transport system and treat our transport workers properly instead of constantly putting pressure on them in terms of wages and conditions.

See this speech in context