Bus Services Dail Éireann — 2026-07-02 ============================================================ Frankie Feighan (FG), Sligo-Leitrim The National Transport Authority, NTA, has statutory responsibility for securing the provision of public transport services nationally, working with the public transport operators that deliver the services and have responsibility for day-to-day operational matters. In this regard, while it is the NTA's priority to provide scheduled public transport services on the Transport for Ireland, TFI, network, it works with event organisers, operators, local authorities and An Garda Síochána to provide additional transport supports where possible to do so. Its focus regarding events is providing additional transport to support large-scale events where required and where operators are in a position to provide additional services. In the context of this specific event, Flavours of Fingal, which is arranged by Fingal County Council in Newbridge House in Donabate for this Saturday and Sunday, 4 and 5 July, the council has provided a private bus shuttle operation each year of this event, which was run by Marathon Coaches to Blanchardstown, Rush, Balbriggan, Swords and the Naul. However, this year, the NTA was informed that Fingal County Council withdrew from providing this bus shuttle service, which is outside the control of the NTA. This was a decision taken by the council, and it was fully removed from the NTA. The NTA’s priority this weekend will be to cover major events at Croke Park and the Aviva Stadium. If capacity on the rail network allows, Irish Rail will support Flavours of Fingal. The bus operators do not have any capacity to put on additional services to Donabate because they will be servicing other, larger events in the city centre. As the Deputy rightly said, there will be between 65,000 and 75,000 people there, so a shuttle bus would be needed. It has to be noted that all TFl operators, including Irish Rail, Dublin Bus and Go-Ahead Ireland, have just serviced nine concerts in Malahide Castle, which concluded on Tuesday, 30 June, last, in circumstances where they all provided significant additional resources for each of the concerts in the series. The NTA is not in a position to provide any further services at this time due to resource availability. The NTA has a dedicated team that attends pre-event meetings in order to plan what additional transport can be provided. Co-ordinating transport across events in different local authority areas can be very challenging, especially at this time of year. For example, last week there were large events at the Aviva Stadium, Croke Park, Malahide and Marlay Park, all on the same day, which put constraints on services. Therefore, the challenge facing the NTA and the transport operators is the number of large-scale events being scheduled concurrently. The resources simply are not available to support them all because support for such events requires vehicles, drivers, support staff, site personnel and security teams, all of which have limited availability due to the normal workload associated with the scheduled services. The Department of Transport requested that the NTA be included as a prescribed body in the draft regulations under the Planning and Development Act. This should assist the NTA in working with local authorities, event organisers and transport operators to ensure a more co-ordinated approach to event licensing and management of transport to and from events. In addition to the specific transport provided for events, as part of the BusConnect's network redesign, the NTA has introduced 15 24-hour bus services across the city, significantly enhancing late night and early morning travel options. This has allowed more people to avail of public transport services. In addition, there are 12 Nitelink services running from the city centre to suburbs on Friday and Saturday nights, providing extra capacity during late-night demand periods. --- 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/2026-07-02/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:14+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-02