I feel that every couple of weeks for the last number of years, I have been getting up here giving out about ghost buses, buses that are put out of order or are packed and people cannot get on them, buses that are cancelled, people waiting forever and people not being able to rely on basic public transport services in this country. There is no recognition by the Government of the fundamental issues. There are staffing shortages, which is an underlying issue, but there are also other issues. It is very clear that privatisation is a disastrous experiment for which workers and commuters are paying the price, if we look at the figures for the lack of punctuality and fines for Go-Ahead. Go-Ahead has 22% of the fines for buses in Dublin but only provides 12% of the services. That is on the one hand. On the other hand are new spine routes that simply do not make sense. I will give some anecdotes from Dublin South-West to go with that overall picture. Up until the F spine, the routes that we got most complaints about all the time were the S6 and the S8 and the lower frequency routes of the W6 and W2. What is the common feature of all of those? They are all Go-Ahead routes. The S6 has so many problems that it has its own Instagram account, I hate the S6, used by students who are going from Tallaght or Blackrock to UCD to highlight all the problems with it. I will give an example from the W6 from Tallaght to Maynooth where, last Thursday, a constituent and 15 other people, to be exact, were waiting at The Square bus terminus for over half an hour for the next bus, not leaving the stop in case it showed up, which it did not, in freezing cold 2°C weather. On the F spine, people are telling me again and again that their journeys into town have been increased by half an hour. We have this new high-frequency route, but because the route is going to places that do not make sense and are not made for a whole number of buses to be going to, the routes have slowed down significantly. That is the NTA's fault, not Dublin Bus's fault.

Sentiment score: -0.09

It is Government policy to slice and dice and privatise our routes in Dublin. By every metric of reliability, punctuality and penalties incurred, Go-Ahead is much worse than Dublin Bus. Why then is the Government persisting with privatising routes and giving them to Go-Ahead? Why are they not returned to Dublin Bus? Will the Government call a halt to the plans to privatise even more routes to Go-Ahead, including routes 56A, 65 and 77A, in light of all of the evidence shown that Go-Ahead provides a much worse service? It is interesting that in the answer, the F spine is given as a good example. I got an email a few days ago that takes on board all the changes. It states that the F1 bus: takes nearly 2 hours from O'Connell Street to the Square, and that journey was taken in Saturday afternoon traffic. The amalgamations made for this route were frankly ridiculous, and the bus travels through several small estates lacking in necessary traffic infrastructure to properly facilitate a bus route. These residents have lost their previously efficient 49, 54A and other routes and the new F1 is not a suitable replacement. I could go on and on with similar stories.

Sentiment score: -0.02