I hope John Lewis is coming to Dublin. Some 70,000 workers own the company and have managed it brilliantly. I understand it is an up-market company. Is the Chairman talking about the John Lewis Partnership? I believe it may look at things differently from ordinary capitalist companies.
I take reassurance from what Mr. Brennan and Mr. Tierney said in regard to the future. As Labour Party spokesperson on transport and as I find out more about metro north — Mr. Frank Allen will appear before the committee again — it seems a little scary. It will require serious management. We need the utmost amount of consultation and publication of information. We need to tell the people about it. People thought that perhaps the Spire would have to go.
I was in Liverpool earlier this year when the main railway station was being rebuilt. The amount of disruption that caused was amazing. One had to go from one of the outlying stations into the centre. It was quite messy and I am sure Liverpool Chamber of Commerce had problems with it.
I take reassurance from what was said but what has happened with the bus gate is perhaps a bit of a warning. While the business improvement district scheme, BIDs, committee said it was very successful for bus throughput and for ease of access through the bus gate, it was concerned that of 200 buses which went through in both directions over a one-hour period surveyed, 11% or so were either empty or out of service, 40% had fewer than 12 people on them and 23% were only a quarter full. A significant number of buses were not doing very much to carry people into the north and south inner city centre. Perhaps we need to liaise with Dublin Bus in that regard.
In figures supplied to me, Grafton Street was second in a hierarchy of high streets in the UK in terms of footfall. It is ahead of Church Street in Liverpool and is right behind Oxford Street. There are strong similarities between the UK and the Irish economies. The latest figures showed the UK was not coming out of recession before us but it is striking that we were down 9.3% in terms of inner city patronage while it was down 4.2% to 4.9%. The fall in inner city patronage here was twice that of London, Liverpool and Manchester.
We talked about political parties today and I would like to attack the Green Party. Deputy Cuffe attacked my party last night. My party is the largest party on Dublin City Council and has been very courageous in supporting the manager in many of these matters and in backing it up on the cycle scheme and so on. Deputy Cuffe attacked our work on the city council, attacked us for not having bottle and so on. This is the same Deputy who voted for a cut of 300 buses — 150 in Bus Éireann and 150 in Dublin Bus — an outrageous state of affairs.