Paul Murphy
Dublin South-West · People Before Profit-Solidarity · Ireland
“The Minister of State assured us we are bound by international law but then went on to talk about the fact that he wants to deploy troops outside the framework of international law. That is why the Government is getting rid of the triple lock. All the triple lock does is ensure that we only can send troops in line with international law.”
“The case for MetroLink south west is extremely strong. There are 350,000 people living between the Luas red and green lines. That is who will be served by this.”
“Hopefully the junior Minister will be able to clarify. The Minister, Deputy McEntee, said earlier to Deputy Ó Laoghaire, "The people I speak to do not like the fact that Russia has essentially removed, or will remove in the coming months, all our peacekeeping troops from UNIFIL".”
“I, too, want to ask about the senior Minister. This came up at the Dáil reform committee last week. It is very peculiar that a senior Minister is here and has answered previous questions on the triple lock today and then – no offence meant - we have the junior Minister answering these questions, which precisely prevents the continuation o…”
“Its defence is that we should not worry because the Government is only going to send them as part of an international force. I do not think anyone here thinks the Government is going to invade a country all by itself.”
“It is there in black and white in the programme for Government and the Government needs to live up to its commitment to do a new, properly independent feasibility study. I appeal to the Minister of State to ask the Minister for Transport to meet with the metro south west group which has been doing such excellent campaigning on this issue.”
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“It is excellent and inspiring to see the Disability Federation of Ireland, the Irish Wheelchair Association and Access for All Ireland working together to put this issue on the agenda and put pressure on the Government. On 9 December, despite a storm, they were outside the Dáil to protest the Government’s cuts. They said then that the Government is forcing them into a choice between heating and eating. They warned that people could be in an absolutely desperate situation and could die as a consequence. Did the Government listen? No. That is why we need to build this movement even further. Disabled people need to be at the centre of that movement, fighting for an affordable Ireland.”
“What did the Government say? It said, “Yes, no problem. There you go. Here is €300 million”. That is public money going to Google when it would cost less than that to implement what is being asked for here, namely an emergency winter disability payment for those people who have been affected by these awful cuts. We know - the Government knows too - that the cost of having a disability in this country in 2021 was over €10,000. Today, it is around €15,000. While the official at risk of poverty rate is 32.5%, when the cost of disability is added, the risk of poverty increases to between 65% and 76%. We know that 39% of those who are unable to work due to disability are living in enforced deprivation, which is quite grinding poverty. We know we have the worst rates of employment of disabled people of any country in the European Union.”
“It has been said again and again but cannot be said enough that the disabled support grant has been cut by €400, that the living alone allowance lump sum of €200 is being cut, that the fuel allowance is being reduced for disabled people with a net loss of €160 and that the October double payment of €254 and the electricity credits of €250 have been cut. The total value of cuts for disabled people is €1,404. That is utterly shameful. It is worth noting – I always try to make this point when we are talking about this issue – that in the context the same budget in which the Government took such a cruel approach to disabled people, Google walked in the front door of the Department of Finance and had a meeting with the Minister for Finance in which it asked that the research and development tax credit be increased by 5%, from 30% to 35%.”
“Incredibly, the Government, during a time when it has a significant budget surplus, has targeted disabled people. There is no question about that. It has targeted disabled people for particularly cruel cuts. We know that, incredibly, the budget made almost everyone worse off. People who do not own big fast food restaurants, who have not developed a bunch of apartments or who are not big landlords have basically been made them worse off. The budget made the poorest even more worse off, and it made disabled people the worst off.”
““My life is a balance between heating my home or feeding my children”. That is not exaggeration or scaremongering. Rather, those are the precise words - I took them down when she spoke at the briefing in the audiovisual room - of a disabled woman who is facing the impact of these horrific and cruel cuts from the Government. To attempt to shame the Opposition for speaking this truth and reflecting this reality and say that we are scaremongering in some way is very poor form on the part of the Government. This is the life people are living. I thank the Social Democrats for bringing forward this important motion. I do not thank the Government for bringing forward its shameful countermotion. The Government likes to talk a lot about targeting supports. That is its big talking point on this issue. It is targeting all right.”
“There was a Government press release after the Minister of State, Deputy Niamh Smyth, met with X saying that "Grok, as integrated on the X platform, has been disabled from removing or reducing clothing on individuals worldwide." That was not true. I asked the Minister of State whether the Department had checked that out and whether it was true. It had not. In the course of the meeting, I was able to get someone in my office to use a VPN to pretend they were in Paris and, with my consent, create an image which undressed me. They said to the Minister of State not to worry and that this had been turned off worldwide when it has not been turned off worldwide and anyone with a modicum of tech knowledge will know how to get around this and continue to produce abusive materials. What will the Government do about it?”
“The EU-African Union summit discussed the European Union's international digital strategy, which includes AI and online platforms. As the host country for so many big tech corporations, does the Taoiseach accept that Ireland has a unique responsibility to hold them to account? It is clear that is not happening. It is clear from the appearance of the Minister of State with responsibility for AI at our committee today that the main approach of the Government appears to be to hide behind the European Union and suggest the European Commission should act in order to shrink from taking action itself and just put it on the long finger. It also seems the Government approach has been to take the word of unscrupulous big tech bosses like Elon Musk.”
“Is the Taoiseach seriously still planning to go to give him a bowl of shamrock and allow him to greenwash himself, to present himself as a friend of the Irish when an Irish grandmother was detained for five months by ICE and when undocumented Irish people are afraid to leave their homes? Why not give the shamrock to them instead of Donald Trump?”
“It really says something when the US boycotts the G20 in South Africa on the grounds of the racist conspiracy theory of white genocide. It is a conspiracy theory propagated by those who want South Africa to go back to apartheid. It is illustrative of a regime that is ruled by a monstrous bully who has torn up any semblance of pretending to care about international law, if US imperialism ever did. Since the start of this year the Americans have kidnapped a president and killed over 100 people in that country of Venezuela, they have threatened to annex Greenland, they have invented this Board of Peace made up of war criminals and authoritarians, and now Donald Trump is excusing and lying about the execution of their own citizens on the streets of Minneapolis by ICE, a state authority.”
“Did the Cabinet agree this morning to press ahead with abolishing the triple lock without holding a referendum? If it did, why is the Taoiseach reneging on the promises he personally made to the Irish people in order to get the Nice and Lisbon treaties passed? It now seems crystal clear, despite the Tánaiste promising me just last September that alternative safeguards would be introduced, that there will be no safeguards whatsoever to ensure our soldiers can only be sent on genuine peacekeeping missions. Has the Government rejected the all-party recommendation of the Oireachtas committee for a formal legal review to be carried out before Irish troops are sent into harm's way without UN approval? Under the new laws, the State could have sent troops to fight in Iraq.”
“We have to turn off this toxic torrent at the source - the big tech companies and the billionaire psychopaths who own them - rather than continuing to put all the responsibility on individual users and on parents, who are completely overwhelmed. Ms Niamh McDonald from the Hope and Courage Collective, an expert in this area who spoke at our press conference this morning, argued correctly that we must treat big tech just like big tobacco. It is the big tobacco of our day and we must take action now to prevent even more widespread harm. I hope all parties across the Dáil will support the Bill.”
“The Tánaiste recently said that some things are more important than money. Now it is time for the Government to show it actually believes that, to take action, to agree with us and to turn off the toxic algorithms that direct our children to this horrific material. We need to do this urgently, not just to protect children but to protect the mental health of adults being bombarded with horrible, toxic content on a daily basis. The big tech companies know that hardly anyone would choose to see this stuff given the choice. That is why they lobbied Coimisiún na Meán so hard to get rid of the recommendation to turn off these recommender algorithms by default.”
“Within minutes, the app can create extreme, degrading, deepfake pornography of girls in their class in school. Is the Government going to continue to stand over big tech companies profiting from a depraved race to the bottom? The Taoiseach has been one of big tech's biggest boosters, regurgitating their public relations, PR, line on repeat that AI is the fourth industrial revolution on par with mechanisation and the printing press. The Government is tearing up planning laws, breaking its own legally binding climate laws and sacrificing electricity desperately needed for housing and public transport, all so that big tech can build even more data centres to store all the data where the algorithms operate and train their AI. Are they going to continue to sell our souls to big tech?”
“A study by Dublin City University, DCU, in 2024 showed how blank social media accounts identified as belonging to 16- and 18-year-old males were fed masculinist, anti-feminist and other extremist content between two and 23 minutes of being set up. Within two to three hours of viewing, three quarters of the content recommended by the algorithm was toxic. The media are now reporting how so-called artificial intelligence, AI, girlfriend apps and websites are being pushed to teenage boys across all major social media platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and X. "AI girlfriend" is a misleading term for apps with taglines like "Build your own AI slut", which incite boys to create sexual abuse imagery by suggesting they can upload real photos of people they know.”
“TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram - all of them - are pushing toxic content at children and adults every single second of the day. Their sole purpose in doing so is to maximise their profit. They know that extreme content keeps people watching longer. The longer the eyes are on the screens, the more ads they can see and the more money that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg can make. For girls, they recommend content promoting self-harm, suicide and eating disorders. Research in 2022 estimated that Meta makes over a quarter of a billion euro a year from pro-eating disorder accounts and related advertising on Instagram, most of which is targeted at young girls. For boys, it pushes anti-feminist manosphere content from misogynistic abusers like Andrew Tate. Numerous studies have shown how quickly this pushing happens.”
“It also implements the original recommendation of Coimisiún na Meán in its draft online safety code to turn off social media algorithms by default before lobbying by big tech got that removed. Government Ministers have also previously said they support this. The Minister, Deputy McEntee, told the Dáil last year that she fully agreed that algorithms need to be switched off. Public opinion definitely strongly supports this. An Ireland Thinks opinion poll last September found that 68% of people want these toxic algorithms turned off. The urgency around forcing big tech to turn off its toxic algorithms has become even clearer in recent weeks. Elon Musk, the almost trillionaire owner of X and Grok, has turned Twitter into a machine for the mass production of child sexual abuse imagery and image-based sexual abuse of women. It is not just X.”
“I move: That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to amend the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022 to regulate the use of recommender algorithms by video-sharing platform services. I am delighted to introduce what, I think, is a very important Bill, the Online Safety (Recommender Algorithms) Bill 2026. The Bill is very simple; it bans big tech companies from targeting children with toxic algorithms and turns them off by default for those over 18. This implements the unanimous all-party recommendation of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Artificial Intelligence, of which I am a member, in its first report published before Christmas.”
“It says it attaches the highest importance to the UN Charter but, in reality, it is part of the process of tearing up that charter. That is what getting rid of the triple lock is about. It is now in a bind because of the threats to Greenland. Ordinary people want the Government to stand up, not to give the President the shamrock on St. Patrick's Day. and to stop the US's use of Shannon Airport.”
“The highest aspiration of European leaders is to be a "happy vassal" to the US. Is the Minister of State a happy vassal or is he a miserable slave? Despite all the evidence of the results of appeasement, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Lowry group continue with their boot-licking and their attempts at appeasement. After the US funding, arming and supporting the genocide in Gaza for over two years and the apartheid state of Israel for decades, the Government is still appeasing Trump. It is scandalously breaking the promise it made to the electorate on the occupied territories Bill. It was practically silent when it came to the kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, the killing of dozens of Venezuelans and Cubans and the injuring of over 100. The Government now says it will give consideration to the board of peace plans.”
“Donald Trump is a monster. The one good thing about him is that he exposes the monstrous reality of the imperialist and capitalist world system we live in. It is a system that is ugly, bloody and brutal and in which might is right, profits matter for all and people matter for nothing. He has done away with the fig leaf of international law and exposed the US's naked and violent imperialism for everyone to see. One of the things exposed by Trump is the subordinate position of the European Union. In Davos yesterday, the Prime Minister of Belgium, Bart De Wever is reported as saying: Until now, we tried to appease the new president in the White House.... But now so many red lines are being crossed ... Being a happy vassal is one thing. Being a miserable slave is something else. There we have it.”
“Why does the Government have it in for disabled people and carers? It had a budget where disabled people were singled out for a particularly cruel set of cuts, amounting to more than €1,400. Now we have carers being faced with substantial tax bills. One man in his 80s is facing a bill of more than €6,000. These people are not tax dodgers. They are saving the State billions of euro because of the work they are doing in caring for a loved one at a tiny fraction of the cost it would take for the State to pay for it privately. Will the Government leave the carers alone and instead focus its attention on the Ministers who owe tens of thousands of euro to the State and have not made any attempt to repay it over seven months after they found out about it?”
“Every fat cat billionaire from Denis O'Brien to Jeff Bezos is pontificating against working from home while they sit on their yachts. We need to give people the right to work from home, and we need to invest in free frequent public transport.”
“The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, is not expecting any significant change even though submissions from frustrated workers outnumbered those from employers by more than ten to one. The level of corporate capture we have seen here is not an isolated case. The campaigning organisation Uplift launched an important report yesterday that lays out in damning detail the scale of corporate power in this State. Across social media, health and housing, big business is setting the agenda and dominating every aspect of our lives. We can hear it in the car radio as we sit in traffic, forced to drive because of that corporate capture and the long-fingering of projects like DART+ South West and Luas Finglas and the absence of new funding for public transport services this year. The anti-working-from-home trend is going to make things worse.”
“All of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of workers who could do their jobs just as well at home got parts of their lives back. There were high hopes that the Government's law on remote working would back them up and protect that precious work-life balance. Leo Varadkar even claimed that businesses would need a very good reason not to allow staff to work from home. What happened was that the Government danced to the tune of big business, as usual. It betrayed workers and brought in what is a meaningless right to request remote working. It is not worth the paper it is written on. Over the past year we have seen lobbying from the Dublin Chamber of Commerce to ensure that no real rights are given to workers. The same thing is happening with the public consultation on the law that started last year.”
“The Government is barely a year in office and is already on track to be one of the worst Governments on record when it comes to public transport. It depends on right-wing rural TDs who could not care less about commuters in Dublin or elsewhere. All they want is more money for roads in their constituencies. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Ministers are perfectly happy with that, relaxing in their chauffeur-driven Mercs and claiming thousands of euro in travel expenses while ordinary workers are stuck behind the wheels of their cars and on buses and trains for hours every day and forced to pay the full cost of fuel, motorway tolls, bus fares and wasted time out of their own pocket. About the only good thing to come out of Covid was the normalisation of working from home.”
“They are algorithms made to maximise eyeballs on the screen, to maximise profits, and which push hateful, misogynistic, suicidal material, and eating disorders on young people. Does the Taoiseach agree that we should turn off the toxic algorithms? We will introduce a Bill to do that on Thursday.”
“The Taoiseach's Government and governments around the world have an important choice to make. The choice is whether the profits of big tech corporations are going to come before the health and safety of our children. For now, these interests are counterposed. We saw it in a stark way in the mass production of child sexual abuse imagery and sexual abuse imagery of women on Grok. There was a protest outside the offices of X at the weekend. I know the Taoiseach previously heralded AI as akin to the industrial revolution or the printing press. This is how it is being used by the big tech corporations. A big question is whether we will follow the original advice from Coimisiún na Meán to turn off the toxic algorithms on social media.”
“The report highlighted the work of the Whitechurch addiction support project, which is supported through the Drug Related Intimidation and Violence Engagement, DRIVE, initiative. It has done excellent work supporting 75 families in the past year. However, the kicker came at the end of the report when we heard that the funding for this DRIVE project is now over and this work will end in the next month. It seems incredible that at a time when the Government is promoting this project nationally, funding is being taken away from local projects to assist families in dealing with this intimidation.”
“This morning, a powerful piece on "Morning Ireland" about drug-related intimidation described how families are confronted by drug dealers who say that their child owes them a certain amount of money and the family now owes this money and they will terrorise the family until it gives them the money. One woman said that 50% of the time, she feels a knot in her stomach as a result of stress. Another woman said that every time a car comes down into her cul-de-sac at night-time, she thinks: "Are they coming for me?". In another case, these gangsters turned up at a person's door with crowbars and tried to break in when she was there alone. This is a thing that is happening across the city.”
“The Oxfam wealth report published yesterday exposed the stark class divide that exists in society between billionaires, the wealthy and everyone else. Ireland's 11 billionaires have the same wealth as 3.5 million Irish adults combined. It takes them just seven hours to rack up the annual income of an average worker. Oxfam shows how a tax on the top 1% of the wealthiest people in the country could yield €1 billion a year. It is a no-brainer. Why not take from the super-rich, who can well afford it, to address the cost-of-living crisis for ordinary families? The Government refused to do it in the past but wealth inequality is still rising. Vital cost-of-living payments were cut in the budget, including the shameful cuts for disabled people. A sum of €1 billion would go a long way towards that.”
“We got a glimpse from the genocide in Gaza where Irish data centres were holding Israel Defense Forces, IDF, intelligence data used to target and murder whole families. They are used to train AI using vast amounts of stolen data created by artists, creatives and ordinary people in their social media posts. They store vast amounts of our personal data that they use to target us with advertising and algorithms. Next week, I will be introducing our online safety recommender algorithms Bill to turn off these hateful toxic algorithms for children under the age of 18 and turn them off by default for adult users.”
“The only way that the AI revolution is genuinely industrial is in the escalating demand for power and for water-hungry data centres. The 19th century industrial revolution turbocharged the burning of fossil fuels for profit, ultimately laying the basis for the climate crisis. The AI revolution is doubling down on that, accelerating climate collapse. Donald Trump told the World Economic Forum last year that he wanted to double US energy production to power AI and big tech and that they could fuel it with anything they wanted, including coal. Our Government is following Trump's lead by bending over backwards to facilitate data centre expansion. Data centres are already maxing out the grid. They are already swallowing up electricity that we need for housing and public transport even though we do not know what is going on.”
“To hell with the human or the environmental cost. Their latest reaction to attempt to assuage public concern was to geolimit it. In other words, if a person has a virtual private network, VPN, they will be able to continue to access and produce this abusive and illegal imagery. The background to the latest AI scandal is the Covalen strike. Content moderators hired by big tech and outsourced to police the wild west that it has created are to be replaced by AI. Anybody worried about AI should support this strike. Without humans moderating it and social media, it will become even more of a hellscape than it is already. Content moderation is an incredibly hard job that is traumatic. It should be highly paid and carried out by humans. Otherwise, child protection is going to be left to AI. Does any parent want that?”
“The Government has drunk the big tech Kool-Aid big time if it believes that churning out child sexual abuse imagery and misogynistic image-based sexual abuse of women on an industrial scale - over 160,000 images in one 24-hour period at the start of this year - is an industrial revolution. If it is, it is an industrial revolution that ordinary people want no part of. This is a revolution of the warped, big tech billionaires and their Government cheerleaders. They want this pollution in our lives because it makes them so much money. If you look at Musk's reaction to the scandal, it was to say that the feature would be limited to subscribers in order to monetise it. For depraved billionaires like Musk, Zuckerberg or Bezos, there is no such thing as bad publicity, only free advertising and opportunities.”
“He said this was just as significant as the printing press or the industrial revolution. His conclusion was that the EU needed to innovate more and regulate less when it came to AI, that it must not "tie companies up in knots so that don't over-regulate to the extent that we paralyse certain sectors of the economy". On Tuesday, he said that arresting the people in X who were responsible for Grok producing child sexual abuse imagery would be like 1984 . How low can he go in bending over for big tech? We now have the rightful and righteous horror of people about the realities of AI and what it is being used for, but the Government is going to continue on its same track of being fundamentally subservient to big tech. What is really Orwellian are the breathless claims that AI is some kind of fourth industrial revolution.”
“There was an interesting opinion poll a few weeks ago that showed only 27% of Irish people had a positive view of AI compared with 48% who believed that it would be a force for bad in the coming years. Research by RED C found that Irish people have among the lowest levels of trust in AI in the world. That demonstrates some good sense. Why? I think it is because people smell a rat. This is being forced down our throats by big tech and by propaganda from a Government that is in thrall to big tech. People get it. This is not improving my life. It is not making my life easier. Last year, the Taoiseach told us that AI was "in the same realm as the industrial revolution, and the printing press". I challenged him on this on one occasion and he stood over it, 100%.”
“This is not addressing the additional costs they have as a consequence of being disabled. Before the latest round of costs, 13.6% of disabled people were unable to heat their homes properly. One in five are in arrears on their utility bills. It is a very simple ask for an emergency payment now. Disabled people cannot wait for this process. They cannot wait for the next budget.”
“I find it bizarre that the Minister is saying he has responded. He has not responded. There is an ask that has come as a consequence of his budget decisions, which cut a bit over €114 from disabled people. While it is true that the Minister has given a little bit of this back through the small increases, he has left people worse off to the tune of more than €1,000 per annum. Their ask is that they need, at the very least, an emergency winter payment now. The Minister is claiming he has responded to that with the original budget, which is where the cuts were made in the first place. Disabled people are responding to the budget. It is why they have come up with their ask. In response to the Minister's point about services, which is what we hear non-stop, disabled people would say that the majority of them are not in receipt of services.”
“This follows on from a number of previous questions. I would say disabled people watching this at home are screaming at their television screens because they are being told by the Minister not to worry as a permanent payment is coming. What they are saying, and I quote Joan Carthy, is that people are suffering today and they cannot wait another day, never mind another four years. They desperately need an emergency €400 winter cost-of-disability payment now to make up just a fraction of the cuts the Minister has implemented. This is the ask and it is very simple.”
“One woman said her life was a balancing act between heating her home or feeding her children. Another disabled woman spoke about how she was no longer able to afford to put her child in a crèche. These are horrendous stories and the Government has made these people's lives worse. It could reverse that. We will come to the next question on an emergency payment while we are waiting for this annual cost-of-disability payment to come through.”
“If the Minister wants to quote payments, we can quote payments. The Irish Wheelchair Association, Access for All Ireland and the Disability Federation of Ireland have done very good work in making people aware of the cruel cuts that the Government has introduced in the last budget. The disability support grant was €400 previously. It has been removed, meaning a loss of €400. The living alone allowance saw a loss of €200. The fuel allowance saw a loss of €160. The October double payment saw a loss of €254. The loss of the electricity credit was another loss of €250. This is a total net loss for disabled people of €1,404. There was a powerful briefing in the audiovisual room yesterday, where we heard from all these organisations and from disabled people about the extreme crisis that they were in.”
“We have the lowest rate in the entire European Union of disabled people who are in work. The Government had a €400 lump sum disability payment last year. That was a drop in the ocean. Far from increasing it as promised, however, the Government actually abolished it completely and then cut a whole series of other payments, putting people into even more dire poverty. That needs to be reversed immediately.”
“It says a lot about the priorities of the Government that it can have fast-tracking of VAT cuts for fast food giants and developers whereas, although it has this on-the-paper commitment to an annual cost-of-disability payment, the payment does not come in. Instead, the Government cuts disabled people's income substantially. We know and the Government acknowledges - it has commissioned the report itself - that it costs a lot of money to be disabled in this country. Adjusted for inflation, the Indecon report states it is between about €10,000 and €15,000 a year. It means an extra €500 a week. That is how much disabled people need to come close to a normal standard of living. The rate of enforced deprivation for disabled people who are unable to work is massive at 39%. The rate of consistent poverty is one in five.”
“The programme for Government promises an annual cost-of-disability support payment, suggesting that it will be incrementally increased. Instead of introducing that in the last budget, the Government introduced an incredible series of cruel cuts, totalling over €1,400 for disabled people. When is the Minister going to right this wrong? What level of payment is he going to introduce? When is he going to introduce this annual cost-of-disability payment?”
“I want to return to the issue of the €141 million paid by the public to the World Bank in advance of Paschal Donohoe taking up his new job. Yesterday the Taoiseach told me a formal business case was prepared by the Department of Finance and the low option was €141.4 million. I have read the business case. It lists a number of options. It lists option 3, which is the World Bank's envisaged level and what it was asking for - €131.4 million. It describes the €141.4 million as the higher level option, not the low option. Would the Taoiseach like to correct the record of the Dáil? Can he explain why we paid €10 million more than the World Bank asked for?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 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.”