Public Transport Dail Éireann — 2026-03-18 ============================================================ Darragh O'Brien (FF), Dublin Fingal East I thank Deputy Whitmore for the opportunity to discuss bus services and the future expansion of bus services in Wicklow. In many instances, good or very good services are being provided but obviously this is not the case with the L2 service, given what Deputy Whitmore has outlined. I will get to that specifically. Deputy Whitmore knows that, as Minister, I am responsible for policy and overall funding for public transport and I am not involved in day-to-day operations. Having said that, feedback like this is important. I do not welcome it, though, in the sense that I would rather there were not instances like this. Everyone will understand that from time to time issues and matters arise. Last year, we saw record-breaking numbers of PSO public transport journeys throughout the country. People are responding but what they need is information with regard to relying on particular bus services. I am struck by what Deputy Whitmore said about 13 March, when eight buses did not show up. That is wholly unacceptable. There could be an issue from time to time with a driver being sick and no relief driver being available, but it then occurred again on St. Patrick's Day. I will make inquiries directly about the L2 service, which I will get to in a moment. I am very focused on increasing the number of people using public transport across all our operators, including bus services across the country, Local Link with which we have had great success, intercity services and rail. We are seeing people respond to this. In the budget for 2026, we secured €940 million funding for public service obligation routes and TFI services received significant funding of €658 million. We are looking to cover both of these areas and we have a 46% increase in the PSO. Specifically regarding the L2 service and the Go-Ahead contract between Glendalough and Bray, from what Deputy Whitmore has said and from my research in advance of answering the question, I appreciate that customers have experienced significant difficulties with regard to cancellation and reliability. This has now been acknowledged by the operator. It told me there were a number of factors, primarily fleet availability and staffing. The National Transport Authority has been meeting Go-Ahead on a weekly basis to review performance and work with it to develop a plan to resolve the issues. It has advised me that performance has improved in recent weeks. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-03-18/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:45+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-03-18