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

I will raise two issues. First, and as the Taoiseach will be aware, I have raised the issue of taxi drivers many times. There is deep concern among taxi drivers about a campaign that seems to involve some of the ride-hailing apps, including Uber and others, suggesting that we are chronically short of taxis and implying we need to deregulate the taxi industry and develop the Uber model that exists elsewhere. Taxi drivers are concerned about that. They would like to be assured that we will not go down that road.

If you were to go out of this building now, you would find lines of taxis on many taxi ranks for which there are no fares. For much of the time, there is no work available for taxi drivers. They acknowledge that there are pinch points, but they feel it is completely wrong that the lack of public transport such as buses, especially at night, in a sufficient quantity and at a sufficient frequency should not land at their door. It is not fair to blame them for that problem. If we deregulate - there was deregulation in this area previously and it had quite disastrous consequences - people who, for example, forked out huge amounts of money to buy new electric vehicles or other new vehicles to use as taxis will not be able to make the income to repay the loans they took out.

It has also been stated that the reluctance of some taxi drivers to work at night is to do with safety issues. Indeed we have heard bus workers talking about similar safety issues. Again, safety problems late at night are not the fault of taxi drivers any more than they are the fault of bus workers. These issues have to be addressed by the Government, the National Transport Authority, NTA, An Garda Síochána and so on, rather than land at the door or taxi drivers. Critically, regarding passenger safety, it has been pointed that when you get into a properly regulated taxi, you know who your taxi driver is, that they are the person supposed to be, that they have the knowledge and so on, but that if we go down the totally deregulated Uber route, the safety of passengers could be compromised. For all these reasons, taxi drivers are asking that if issues need to be addressed in this area, that the NTA and other bodies engage with taxi representative groups that are more than willing to discuss these issues. There should be no question of the totally deregulated model being introduced.

I will briefly mention one other matter. There is a massive backlog regarding driving tests. In my area, it takes a year to get a test. Sometimes, this means that people cannot take up jobs they have been offered and so on. One of the problems is that we are relying too much on temporary contracts for driving testers-----

See this speech in context