Public Transport Dail Éireann — 2026-03-18 ============================================================ Jennifer Whitmore (SD), Wicklow The Minister is correct that I am being told a different story by people on the ground. I will come back to him directly on this. I am worried about how no-shows are being recorded. I am being told there are no-shows, yet the NTA is not recording them or they are not being recorded in the systems as no-shows. I will speak to the Minister about this because it may require a more in-depth conversation. The Minister knows I am a big fan of public transport but it also needs to be reliable. If it is not reliable, there is no point to it. I know there have been issues with mechanics, the fleet and drivers. To be fair to people in Wicklow, they have given Go-Ahead a really good chance to get these things right but they are still not right. That is a big difficulty. At some stage, Go-Ahead has to be able to provide the service it is contracted to provide. If it has issues with drivers, fleet or mechanics, that is on it. It has a job to do and it is being paid to do the job. It is time it started doing that job and providing a proper bus service for Wicklow. I want to speak to the Minister about the 199 route, which is to run between Bray and Glendalough, servicing Laragh, Roundwood and Kilmacanogue. In May 2025, the NTA told me it was prioritising this particular route and that it had funding for it. In early September, I learned a provider had been awarded the contract and that it was to start in September 2025 but this still has not happened. I know of two women in Roundwood who had to give up their college places because they could not get from Roundwood to UCD or to Dublin because there was no public transport that would get them there. That service was promised and was meant to be up and running last September. When I last raised it with the Minister of State, Deputy Buttimer, he said the NTA was waiting for the 2026 service plan. That was in late January. There is still no news about the 199 route. There is a bus waiting, a driver waiting and a whole community waiting for that 199 service to start. --- 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