Paul Murphy urges free, frequent public transport nationwide

Thanks a lot. Just quickly, first of all, I just want to thank on behalf of all of the participants in the Global March to Gaza, particularly the Irish ones, for the support we received from ordinary people in this country. I express my wish that everybody who's currently being detained by the Egyptian authorities is released and able to go home, and obviously to continue to apply pressure to prevent the sort of scenes we saw yesterday, where over 50 people killed by tanks, Israeli tanks, while queuing to access humanitarian aid, and that the blockade and forced starvation needs to end. Thanks to Deputy O'Gorman for bringing forward this motion, which we support. We think we need free, frequent public transport. That should be the goal, and not something that is just accessible in urban areas, but outside of urban areas. That is, for as many people as possible, good quality, fast, public transport becomes a realistic option. This is probably first and foremost an environmental issue. Transport is our second biggest sector in terms of carbon emissions. But it's also a cost of living issue, people spending thousands of euros a year on transport. Obviously, car transport is the most expensive transport, but still public transport being expensive and price being a factor for people. And it's also a quality of life issue. I'd say there's very, very many people for whom the worst part of the day is sitting in traffic in long commutes. Until a few months ago, I was back in my car for most of my commuting because of doing the creche run. Thankfully, I've got a cargo bike since, so I'm out of it. And, like, definitely the worst part of my day was driving home in traffic with a child in the back. Not happy, therefore. And you don't know how long you're going to be. It could be an hour. It could be an hour and a half. And I'm just going into Tala. There's people who are commuting because of, kind of, the development patterns that we have created here. There's people commuting much, much longer journeys. And it's awful. And I think, you know, this is an example. I think often environmental policies are portrayed as something wrongly that makes people's lives harder, more difficult. Whereas, this is about making people's lives better, cheaper, easier. And it's doable. It's a question of political will to implement free public transport. Which is, people are surprised by how low a cost it is to have actual, to turn what we currently have free. It's about 650 million euros a year. But, obviously, that needs to be matched with significant capital investment in terms of expanding bus, the number of buses that we have, and expanding rail infrastructure as being crucial. But it can be done. It's about a political commitment to actually meeting our climate targets and improving people's lives. Instead, the government seems determined to pursue a policy of privatization. And, you know, the difficulties people experience on a daily basis with ghost buses, with apps that are giving wrong information, are directly related to a privatization agenda. So, instead of having an integrated system, we have the NTA, we have TFI, we have Dublin Bus, we have Go Ahead. All talking to each other, but only to a certain degree. We need a fully integrated, publicly owned system, which actually recruits mechanics, drivers, shortage of both, by offering decent terms and conditions. And the impact, I would say, of the ghost buses, you know, we did a public meeting a few months ago in Tala, and talked to a lot of people campaigning around this issue. You know, it isn't just the day that you're waiting four hours or whatever to get home, or the fact that you miss your work on that day, or you don't get into college on time. It has a corrosive effect in terms of people's confidence in public transport. If you don't know that the bus is going to be there at the time it says it's going to be, but you have to be in work, you have to collect your kid from crash, you have to be in college, well then public transport stops being an issue for you. And it's striking, it's not that Dublin Bus doesn't have problems, it does, but it's striking how it is much worse in terms of Go Ahead. People can look at Go Ahead's record in Britain, which is very poor, and yet more and more routes are being packaged off and given to Go Ahead as part of a privatisation agenda that makes no sense for anybody but the corporations. I make the point, because I think a big part of the government's agenda is the pushing of electric cars as the answer. Obviously, yes, electric cars are better than internal combustion engines. But the answer is not to shift as a society from one model of individual car ownership to just a different type of individual car ownership. Just big hunks of metal sitting all across the country, most of the time not being used, in terms of electric cars, lithium, rare earth and so on being used. They have their own environmental consequences. So, yes, there are people for whom individual car usage is going to be necessary, no question, but we need to give people a real alternative option that I think most people would take if it was genuinely available. And the last point I'll make, I think the main thing is, yes, to give people the alternative and then people will take it. But I also think we need to stop the promotion and advertising of fossil-fueled vehicles and fossil fuels in terms of advertising. The lie that they promote, the nice driving on open roads, going wherever you want, there's no traffic, is not true. And it's propaganda to try and make people buy into them. So we need to be banning fossil-fuel advertising like we banned advertising for smoking and for cigarettes. It's a public health issue as well as being a climate issue. Thanks. Okay. Okay.