We need to believe in buses to get us on the road to sustainability

I WAS sitting on a Bus Éireann bus at the far western fringes of the island one rainy summer’s night when I woman got on. She sat at the front of the bus, chatting to the driver and to the only other customer on the bus.

The shouted conversation was a series of set pieces with gaps left for the laughs. I soon realised she was intellectually disabled. I think she probably had the same conversation on the bus every Saturday night. But no one minded. A busy day was over and home was beckoning through the western rain.

Suddenly the bus turned off the road and drove down a little lane. The woman was helped off the bus and brought, laughing and chatting, to her own front door.

I find myself in tears as I write this. I find myself wondering when the people making the decisions on the future of Bus Éireann last took a bus.

We didn’t have a car for many years and we travelled up and down the country on Bus Éireann buses. We discovered that the company is the blood system of rural Ireland. We discovered that its drivers fill this position with enormous empathy and respect. This is all the more important because the people who make up the majority of Bus Éireann users are the old, the young and newcomers to this country.

I know the company is losing money, some €27 million since 2009. I know the Labour Court has recommended a plan which will cut wages and generate €5m and this is why the Irish Bus and Rail Workers’ Union has balloted for strike action and the result of SIPTU drivers’ ballot is due today.

But it is not true that Bus Éireann wastes taxpayers’ money. By any international standards, the company has been starved of public funding. An independent report by Deloitte in 2009 found the company to be revenue funded by only 12%, as against, say, Conexxion in the Netherlands which is 49 per cent funded, Post Auto in Switzerland which is 51% funded, and TEC Belgium which is funded by 78%. The report also found there was limited scope for cost-saving from network and scheduling changes because they were already “largely efficient”.

State funding to the company has shrivelled from €48m in 2008 to €36m in 2012. Enda Kenny’s assertion in the Dáil on Tuesday that the company’s State subvention last year was “the highest ever” is wholly untrue. And this year’s projected State subvention shows yet another drop, to €34m.

The company did actually make a profit in 2011, but since then there has been a perfect storm of reducing subvention and reducing passenger numbers due to reducing numbers of people working in the economy.

On top of these factors, there is the thorny issue of private bus companies. Licensed to operate on certain routes, they “cherry pick” the profitable ones. They don’t specialise in bringing intellectually disabled women to their front doors in the rain.

Union sources suspect it is the Government’s aim to starve Bus Éireann of cash in order to privatise the bus service. Certainly, as Minister for Transport Leo Varadkar reiterated in the Dáil a couple of months ago, the Programme for Government commits to exploring a “more diverse bus service provision”.

At first sight, it doesn’t make much sense to have Bus Éireann competing with private providers on lucrative routes. The Deloitte report suggests the possibility of completely hiving off certain routes to private providers.

The National Transport Authority has going through a consultation and analysis process on this issue which is expected to conclude this summer. At that point there may be a statutory consultation process on awarding new contracts.

But the authority’s recent presentation to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport and Communications suggested that savings of only 2% or 3% had been logged internationally when services were privatised. In Sweden, a bus privatisation initiative was reversed.

Irish private bus companies have made plain they would not pay Bus Éireann drivers’ rates, and it is questionable how the quality of the workers in this hugely responsible job could then be maintained. In London the falling quality of drivers due to falling pay forced Ken Livingstone to bring in a premium payment.

The question of pay is dominating the dispute between the drivers’ unions and the company. And at first sight the pay cuts, which the Labour Relations Court recommends for the very survival of the company, seem reasonable. Core pay and employment levels are to be protected in return for cuts of premium and overtime rates, cuts to annual leave and an extended working day for some staff.

But you are talking about cuts of some €3,000 to €4,000 for staff earning between €34,000 and €44,000 a year. That’s a threat to the financial survival of the workers and their families. It’s clear that even if the current crisis is resolved it will not be the end of this story — because what is really at issue here is whether we believe in buses or not. And if we don’t believe in buses we don’t believe in social inclusion or environmental sustainability.

The best environmental thinkers promote buses as the travel solution of the future. If you switch from your sexy train to a bus for your journey, you make a saving in carbon emissions of 88%.

WE have built a fantastic road network in our worship of the private car, although their excessive use destroys our society and our environment. If we had the courage and conviction necessary for Bus Éireann to survive and thrive car use would be penalised in favour of bus travel.

We would put a superb fleet of buses on our roads with leg room and high-speed internet access. We would tackle the losses Bus Éireann suffers due to congestion in cities not just with congestion charges, but also with new ways of transporting people to new hubs on the motorways themselves.

And we would build on the strength of a company which is the heartbeat of much of rural Ireland. I understood this clearly one morning as I snaked around a peninsula in Co Mayo, which took on pensioners going to the post office all along the way until there was a carnival atmosphere on the bus. If I had made that journey by private car I would have forgotten it long ago.

Bus Éireann is a huge resource for tourists, as I understood late one Bank Holiday Friday when myself, my husband, four tiny children arrived in Westport and the driver repacked the entire hold to accommodate our bikes, buggies and travel cots.

“Incredible, the Japanese”, the owner of a posh hotel once said to me. “Stay in this hotel and then get the Bus Éireann bus at the bottom of the road!”

That’s what’s wrong with Bus Éireann. It’s not over-paid drivers or bad management. It’s not even just the recession. It’s a vision of an Ireland in which only people who pay car tax really count. A vision of Ireland from a rearview mirror.