Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the extension of the hours during which rural link buses operate. They are extending until 11 p.m. at night on a couple of days at the weekend on a pilot basis over a considerable part of the country, including five routes in my constituency of Cavan-Monaghan. It is a good initiative because we have a real problem with rural isolation and people who are not able to access a social life. We must reconcile the absolute need for road safety with the equal right of people to access social amenities, to shop in town and to have a social drink, if that is what they want to do. With that in mind I ask the Leader to bring the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Ross, to the House to discuss the real need to incentivise publicans to leave their customers home, and in some instances to collect them.This is happening informally in any case because publicans are responsible people who are concerned about their customers. The practice could be incentivised, however, and this could be done at low cost or virtually on a cost-neutral basis if one factors in the revenue this would generate. If, for example, a vehicle registration tax exemption were applied to the vehicles of publicans and measures were introduced to impact positively on their insurance costs, it would incentivise them to bring customers home. Moreover, it would create a moral imperative and societal requirement for publicans to do this because once a community learned that publicans were being provided with advantages for brining customers home, the practice would become the norm. It would also save lives and give people access to their local pub.

There is a serious problem of people being cut off from having a social life and this can cause mental illness, depression and associated difficulties. Everyone should have the right to have the same quality of life as his or her peers. Why should someone living near a Luas line in Dublin have a different quality of life and better access to a social life than someone who happens by choice and often not by choice to live in an isolated area and also wants to access a social life? I appeal to the Leader to take this issue seriously and ask the Minister to come to the House to discuss a range of measures to incentivise publicans to bring home their customers. This will mean creating an expectation among customers that publicans will provide such a service and publicans will be rewarded for providing such a service. This practice is common already but it is done informally. We should formalise, normalise and support it. Given that it can be done in an almost cost-neutral way, it is a no-brainer.