Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for the answer. I obviously accept that the Minister for Transport is not involved in the day-to-day operation of public transport services. I am not holding the Minister personally responsible for any bus not turning up, but at the same time, the Minister of State referred to the Government's recent commitment to improving public transport under the new programme for Government. The underlying issue here is a policy choice of pursuing privatisation of public transport routes, in this case, routes formerly done by Dublin Bus. That is why we have a crisis with the S4, S6 and so on. I recommend that people report no-show buses on noshowbus.ie, on which one will see that between 16 October and 3 December, public transport users reported 48 ghost buses on the S6 route alone.

Like the Minister of State said in his response, the issue being reported is "fleet reliability issues across its network of services due to a shortfall of the availability of mechanics". Why is it having that problem when Dublin Bus is not? The answer is very simple. Go-Ahead Ireland cannot recruit mechanics because Dublin Bus offers better terms and conditions, so if you are a mechanic, you make the entirely rational and reasonable choice to go and work for Dublin Bus and not, therefore, for Go-Ahead Ireland. Who pays the price for that? The workers, who end up with worse terms and conditions in Go-Ahead Ireland, and the commuters who are trying to use public transport. The Taoiseach earlier referred to the Opposition as being fundamentalist in its ideology. It is the most fundamentalist neoliberal ideology to think that we need to do this somehow. It clearly does not work and a different policy decision should be made to get rid of privatisation and to bring the routes back in-house, to Dublin Bus.

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