Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity)

I want to thank all the participants in the Global March to Gaza, particularly the Irish ones, for the support we received from ordinary people in this country. I express my wish that everyone currently being detained by the Egyptian authorities is released, able to go home, and to continue to apply pressure to prevent the sort of scenes we saw yesterday where more than 50 people were killed by Israeli tanks while queuing to access humanitarian aid. The blockade and forced starvation needs to end.

I thank Deputy O'Gorman for bringing forward at this motion, which we support. We believe that we need free and frequent public transport. That should be the goal, and not something that is just accessible in urban areas but also outside of urban areas and for as many people as possible. Good quality and fast public transport should become a realistic option. This is probably first and foremost an environmental issue. Transport is our second biggest sector for carbon emissions. It is also a cost-of-living issue with people spending thousands of euro a year on transport. Car transport is the most expensive transport but still public transport is expensive and price is a factor for people.

It is also a quality of life issue. I would say there are very many people for whom the worst part of their day is sitting in traffic during long commutes. Until a few months ago, I was back in my car for most of my commuting because of the crèche run. Thankfully, I got a cargo bike since, so I am now out of it. Definitely the worst part of my day was driving home in traffic with the child in the back and not happy there. You do not know how long you are going to be. It could be an hour or it could be an hour and a half. I am just going to Tallaght but because of the development patterns we have created here, there are people who are commuting much longer journeys. It is awful. This is an example.

Often environmental policies are wrongly portrayed as something that make people's lives harder and more difficult, whereas this is about making people's lives better, cheaper and easier. It is doable. It is a question of political will to implement free public transport. People are surprised at how low a cost it is to turn what we currently have into a free service. It is about €650 million a year. Obviously that needs to be matched with significant capital investment, in expanding the number of buses we have, and in expanding rail infrastructure, which is crucial. It can be done. It is about the political commitment to meet our climate targets and improving people's lives. Instead, the Government seems determined to pursue a policy of privatisation. The difficulties people experience on a daily basis with ghost buses and with apps that are giving wrong information are directly related to a privatisation agenda.

Instead of an integrated system, we have the NTA, Transport for Ireland, Dublin Bus and Go-Ahead Ireland all talking to one another but only to a certain degree. We need a fully integrated, publicly owned system that recruits mechanics and drivers, there being a shortage of both, by offering decent terms and conditions.

We held a public meeting a few months ago in Tallaght at which we talked to a lot of people campaigning on these issues, including the impact of ghost buses. It is not just about the day somebody is waiting four hours or whatever to get home or that someone does not get to work or college on time one day. These problems have a corrosive effect on people's confidence in public transport. If commuters do not know whether the bus will be there at the time it should arrive and they have to get to work or college or collect their child from the crèche, then public transport stops being an option for them.

It is not that Dublin Bus does not have problems, which it does, but it is striking how it is much worse with Go-Ahead Ireland. People can look at the Go-Ahead Group's record in Britain, which is very poor, yet more and more routes are being packaged off and given to the company as part of a privatisation agenda, which makes no sense for anybody but the corporations.

A big part of the Government's agenda is the pushing of electric cars as part of the environmental solution. Obviously, electric cars are better than cars with internal combustion engines. However, the answer is not for society to shift from one model of individual car ownership to a different type of individual car ownership. There are big hunks of metal sitting all across the country, not being used most of the time, in terms of electric cars, lithium, rare earth and so on. They have their own environmental consequences. There is no question that there are those for whom individual car usage will be necessary, but we must give people a real, alternative option. Most people would take such an option if it were genuinely available.

If we give people an alternative, they will take it. However, we also need to stop the promotion and advertising of fossil-fuelled vehicles and fossil fuels. The picture such advertisements promote of driving on open roads with no traffic, going wherever one wants, is propaganda to make people buy into the lie. We must ban fossil fuel advertising like we banned advertising of cigarettes. It is a public health issue as well as a climate issue.

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