John McGahon (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I want to raise two issues. The first is the practical changes that will arise in transport after Covid. For the last seven years, I commuted from Dundalk to Dublin and I used a tax saver ticket. A tax saver ticket is a yearly ticket and a person can use it seven days a week. If I was to get the Matthews bus from my home town to Dublin, it would cost roughly €2,744 a year, and I could use it at any stage over the seven days. For the last two years, I decided to get Irish Rail, and an annual ticket with Irish Rail cost roughly €3,620. Depending on their tax bracket, people could save between €1,000 and 1,300, so they are a great idea. The problem is that Covid has totally changed what is a normal working week for so many people. The concept of working from home is going to continue and, as a result, we need to respect and understand that, and tailor commuter tickets to meet that demand.

Last July, I wrote to the National Transport Authority, NTA, to ask what its plans were to introduce, say, a three-day tax saver ticket, or at least a multi-day ticket that allows hop on, hop off travel, so people are not wasting money by buying something that lasts them a year. The NTA came back to me to say it was trying to technically facilitate this on the Leap card system. I followed up in September and October and I got the same response, although, admittedly, I have not followed up since then. The point is we are now getting to the stage of Covid where people will start to migrate back into offices in the next couple of months and we need to plan for that. The way we do that is by facilitating multi-share tickets on the Leap card system.

While this is not a direct responsibility of the Minister, I would like that, at some stage in the future when he is dealing with the NTA, he would ask for an update on that matter. If we can get that ready to be rolled out the minute people start returning to office life in the summer or in September, it would be a good idea. The most important point is that it saves people money and gives them more money in their back pockets.

I want to raise the issue of the bike share schemes and e-scooter schemes with regard to transport levels.Bike share schemes should not only be provided in Dublin, Cork, Galway and other highly populated cities but should also be provided in large and small provincial towns across the country. I am from the town of Dundalk, which has a population of approximately 40,000 people. It is an excellent area. A large number of people are employed in multinational companies and there are thousands of students in Dundalk Institute of Technology, DkIT. We have great amenities so a bike share scheme could really work in a town like Dundalk. I would appreciate it if bike share companies not only went Dublin, Galway or Belfast but went to our provincial towns and competed in them.