Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The vast majority of public service obligation bus services are provided by State operators through what are known as direct award contracts. Remaining routes are run by operators awarded a contract following a competitive tendering process. Sometimes those routes are operated by a State operator and sometimes they are operated by a private operator. This mix of contract award processes is in accordance with the relevant EU and Irish regulatory frameworks.

The performance of all public transport operators is monitored by the NTA as part of the contractual arrangements in place between it and the operators and performance reports are available to view on the NTA’s website. I reassure the Deputy that the NTA uses all the contractual and regulatory powers available to it to measure, report on and seek to maintain and improve standards across all PSO public transport services. Further, in instances where performance drops, such as those we saw recently on certain routes, financial penalties are rigorously applied unless the cause of the loss of performance is outside of the control of the operator.

I recently met NTA representatives specifically on this matter because not only do I want the NTA to focus on the bus operators but I want the bus operators to focus on customer service and certainty as best as possible so that people know that if a bus is scheduled, it will turn up. Everybody understands there may be the odd instance where that does not happen but on certain routes we have seen that with too great a frequency. The NTA is carrying out a specific review of those incidents over the past few weeks, at my request, and will report directly back to me. In the instances we are aware of, the issue was due to a shortage of mechanics and the knock-on impact that had on fleet availability. That led to the recent issues on the newly launched phase 6a of BusConnects. We do not want to see this happening. We want more people to use public transport and, thankfully, they do. There were 330 million journeys made on public transport last year, so the figure is increasing and people are responding. The bus network is now better but we need to ensure the service is there to back it up.

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