Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)

I would advise the Minister of State to go back to the Department now and find out whoever wrote that speech for him because that speech was not worth the paper it was written on. I got all the same excuses and the same promises last year. Here we are now and the Minister of State is being rolled in here to read out the same old claptrap again while the people of Cork cannot get a bus.

The Minister of State is talking about a bus to Kinsale. There are 150,000 people living in Cork and he is talking about a bus to Kinsale. There are 25,000 students in UCC and another 15,000 in MTU and he is talking about people from Kinsale going to college, but what about the people of Cork going to college? Some 150,000 people cannot get a bus and the Minister of State is coming in here talking about four buses a day. This is fecking crazy stuff. The Government has a responsibility to deliver a public bus service that delivers for the people. The Minister of State outlined there that the timetables were realistic. I met the company two years ago and told them over in Bus Éireann. I met with them. I sat down in the office and said your timetables are not realistic; they do not add up. I also told them buses should not be going from the north side to the south side because they are getting caught in traffic. They should be turned in the city centre and sent back out the way they came. I was told that could not be done either. We are trying the big solutions here. The Minister of State comes in here and tells me about a recruitment problem. There was a recruitment problem three years ago. What did the company do? Who is responsible? The first line of the Minister of State's speech was that this is a matter for the NTA. He said this is not the Minister's job and not the Government's job-----

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