Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent)

The Deputy is no doubt aware of the considerable amount of research, both domestically and internationally, on what drives increased passenger numbers on public transport. I am happy to report there has been strong growth in passenger numbers in recent years, with numbers trending at plus 9% in 2024 versus 2023. In October 2024, public transport surpassed 1 million PSO passengers a day for the first time ever, with an average of 1 million passenger journeys recorded daily. This growth continues in 2025, with a recent 9% increase in passenger numbers in the last period compared to the same period last year.

The Deputy is right to highlight the importance of ensuring more people are incentivised to make the switch to public transport and also the challenge we face in meeting our transport-related emissions targets. The main drivers are fundamentally around issues such as the availability, frequency and reliability of transport, as discussed earlier. I am pleased to say that progress is being made on each of those issues but, equally, I acknowledge that while the work is well under way, much remains to be done.

On availability, we are rolling out new services across the country under initiatives such as BusConnects in the cities, the town services in the bigger towns and Connecting Ireland in rural Ireland. We need to continue this progress in the years ahead. In terms of frequency, we are supporting the rollout of increased service levels on existing services and ensuring enhanced frequency on new services as they are rolled out. Again, we need to build on this progress in the years ahead. On reliability, we have major infrastructure projects under BusConnects for each of the five cities, as well as introducing improvements to the vehicle location system and real-time passenger information, all of which will improve the reliability of the system. We need to see construction start on those BusConnects corridors in Dublin and roll that out to the other cities too.

Of course, I acknowledge that the affordability of public transport is also important, particularly for certain cohorts of society.

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