Bus Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-14
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

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.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-14/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-14