I wish to share time with Deputy Gilmore.
I thank the Fine Gael Party, particularly Deputy Jim Higgins, for moving this motion, which my party supports at this time. I am disappointed that the Minister responsible for the area under discussion has again shown her contempt for the House by leaving the Chamber. She did not even leave behind a Minister of State from her Department to take the debate. Having said that, I intend no disrespect to the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment and Local Government, Deputy Dan Wallace, who is present. It is nothing new for the Minister to show her contempt for the House.
In everything other than the words used, this is a motion of no confidence in the Minister for Public Enterprise, Deputy O'Rourke. In a Government where mediocrity is the norm and inability to take a decision almost a requirement for office, Deputy O'Rourke has stood out for all the wrong reasons. Rarely has a Minister been found so wanting in meeting the challenge of her portfolio; rarely has a Minister had such vast financial resources at her disposal, yet made so little impact; and rarely has a Minister promised so much and delivered so little in an area so crucial to the quality of life of so many of our citizens. Deputy O'Rourke is an experienced politician who should know that photo opportunities are no substitute for taking decisions and that making funny faces on the Order of Business is no substitute for a coherent public transport policy.
We are experiencing a public transport crisis, the social and economic costs of which are enormous. People have died because they found themselves in dangerous situations as a result of the inadequacy of late night public transport. Hundreds of thousands of people are spending more and more of their time in what should be the simple task of travelling to and from work. It is not unusual even for those who live only a few miles from their place of work to spend an hour travelling there and back. At a rate of two hours a day, or ten hours a week, more than a full working day per week is taken travelling to and from work in the Ireland of the 21st century.
Tens of thousands of people in Dublin and the surrounding areas take their lives in their hands every day by cramming into dangerously overcrowded and inadequate DART and suburban rail carriages. One simply dreads to think what the consequences would be if one of these trains was involved in an accident. The economic cost to business and industry through lost production as a result of people being late for work because of inadequate public transport, or long delays in making deliveries because of traffic gridlock, can only be estimated.
The core problem is the chronic under-funding of public transport and the failure to take and adhere to decisions regarding the development of public transport. All Administrations in recent decades must take a share of the responsibility for the under-funding of public transport, but the primary responsibility for the current situation must rest with this Government and this Minister. Other Governments, in difficult economic times, had to scrape around to try and find £1 million here and another £1 million there. This Government, on the other hand, has virtually unlimited financial resources at its disposal, yet people see the public transport system disimproving and disintegrating before their eyes.
There is a simple rule of thumb when it comes to public transport: what one is prepared to invest determines the quality of what one receives in return. The generally poor level of public transport in this country reflects the fact that it is chronically under-funded.
There is a popular myth that public transport in Ireland receives a huge level of Government subsidy compared to other countries. In fact, the opposite is the case, especially in regard to Dublin Bus. Most of the Government subvention goes to maintaining the rail network. A submission made by the department of economics in UCD to the Minister's Department in April of his year, comparing subvention levels for public transport systems in European cities, found that in the case of Dublin Bus 96.4% of its operating costs came from fares, with just 3.6% from Government subsidy. This is virtually the lowest level of subsidy for any of the 60 European cities surveyed, where levels of subsidy of up to 60% are not unusual. For example, in Vienna 69.9% of operating costs come from subsidies or grants, the main Belgian cities enjoy an average subsidy of 67.4% and in the four Italian cities surveyed, the average level is 60.2%.
Anyone who has been lucky enough to use public transport in the cities to which I refer will testify that this level of subsidy guarantees prompt, efficient, comfortable and reliable services. The systems on offer in these cities represent everything that our public transport system is not. While there may have been some marginal improvement in the situation since the study was prepared, the basic position remains the same.
Subsidy alone will not provide acceptable levels of public transport. It is obvious that acceptable levels of public transport cannot be provided with the level of Exchequer support currently provided in this country. Unfortunately, rather than facing the need for proper levels of subsidy, this Minister has actually gone the road of increasing fares, of asking people to pay more to use an unsatisfactory and inefficient system. At the end of last year, with the Dublin South Central by-election safely out of the way, the Minister, Deputy O'Rourke, announced an increase of 10% in Dublin Bus fares. At a time when Dublin is slowly grinding to a halt because of its chronic traffic problems and when the absolute priority should be to encourage the greater use of public transport, even a Minister as out of touch as Deputy O'Rourke should have recognised that it was an act of lunacy to increase bus fares.
The success of the Stillorgan quality bus corridor, which has resulted in a huge increase in the numbers using buses, indicates that people are prepared to leave their cars behind if there is an economical and efficient public transport system. However, the bus service in much of the city is still inadequate and – largely because of traffic problems – inefficient and unreliable. Increasing fares in these circumstances simply has the effect of encouraging people to return to using their cars which, in turn, will cause the traffic problem to worsen and slow down the buses even more. This vicious circle must be broken. A significant increase in the Government subvention for public transport is essential.
It would be foolish not to recognise that seriously inadequate management and outmoded industrial relations procedures in CIE have contributed to the problems in all three companies. There has been a welcome acknowledgment by management that the old system whereby workers on a low basic wage had to put in long hours of overtime to earn a reasonable income is no longer desirable or acceptable. Poor pay, long hours and poor conditions lead to low morale which, in turn, leads to poor services to the public.
On a number of occasions since taking office, the Minister, Deputy O'Rourke, has managed to make difficult situations within CIE even worse. She has managed to alienate both management and unions in CIE and in a number of the other semi-State companies for which she has responsibility. For the Minister to succeed in this area, she must be able to develop a constructive relationship with both senior management and workers. The Minister has shown the ability to do neither. It is no coincidence that during her period in office, she lost two chairpersons of Telecom and that the chairperson of CIE also decided he had enough.
The Minister's approach to industrial disputes has been unpredictable and inconsistent. On some occasions she has refused to interest herself at all – as in the case of the Dublin Bus strike earlier in the year – while on other occasions she has gone in with fists and boots flying.
That some progress has been made has been due to the efforts of both management and unions, rather than the Minister's ham-fisted approach. The problems that led to the Dublin Bus strike seem to have been largely resolved. It is to be hoped that the agreement reached at the negotiations on Sunday will be approved by DART drivers which will also remove that matter from the agenda. However, the dispute involving signalling staff threatens to bring the national rail system to a halt again this week and there are other disputes simmering just below the surface. An efficient, modern, well funded public transport system, which would be in the interests of both workers and commuters, cannot operate on the basis of a 19th century labour relations model.
Perhaps the most damning characteristic of the Minister's term of office has been her dithering and inability to take decisions. When the Rainbow Government left office in the summer of 1997, plans for the Luas system were well advanced. If they had been allowed to proceed, at least part of the Luas system would now be up and running. Luas would not have provided a complete answer to Dublin's transport problems but if it had been allowed to proceed on schedule, it would now be providing a significant degree of relief.
The first thing Deputy O'Rourke did on entering office was to surrender to pressure from the Progressive Democrats by putting everything on hold until the possibility of running part of the Luas system underground was examined. This took a year and has been followed by a succession of reviews, redrafts, relaunches, new plans and, most of all, endless photo opportunities by the Minister. Three and a half years after taking office, the legacy of the Minister is a public transport system that is slower, less efficient and more expensive. We have not had a single extra DART carriage, while the promised DART extensions to Greystones and Malahide are not yet fully operational. Not a single metre of line is in place for Luas and the small number of additional buses that have been provided has not been able to do anything more than put a small dent in the problem.
At the beginning of October, the Taoiseach was drafted in to launch yet another new plan. On paper the plan for improved suburban surface rail, an underground interconnector, Luas and metro on the surface and underground looks impressive until one reads the small print and discovers that some of these will not be available for at least 15 or 16 years. I am not sure what comfort commuters who have to queue for half an hour this evening for a bus that might or might not come or who are crammed into rail carriages like cattle will get from knowing that, all going well, this problem might be sorted out in 15 or 16 years.
What the public is demanding, and what it is entitled to, is a clear indication of what is planned and intended for Dublin. What it is getting is short-sighted, short-term attempts by Government Ministers to claim credit for initiatives. For example, my understanding is that the Dublin Transport Office has already communicated its long-term co-ordinated vision for the future of Dublin transport to the Government. Why has it not yet been adopted? Instead, the Government has sought to cherry pick what it regards as the juiciest elements of the strategy to claim glory for itself, with Ministers competing with one another in so doing.
This has been the way the Government has dealt with this issue since coming into office. The competing vested interests of the Progressive Democrats and Fianna Fáil effectively forced us back to the drawing board. I give a commitment tonight on behalf of the Labour Party that should we be returned to Government we will not go down that route. We have the plans and the only issue now is implementation. I call on the Government to adopt the DTO plan in full. I also call on it to set out a clear strategy for its full implementation. Its publication should be followed up with an extensive advertising campaign to inform the people of Dublin of the plans that are in place. This should be accompanied by circulation of the relevant material door to door.
The people living in the DTO regime should be asked to endorse the strategy in a plebiscite. We should have an assertion of what the public perceives to be in its best interests. Those who wish to object or complain should have the onus of explaining why their position should override the clearly expressed view of the public. It is time to shift the balance away from "not doing" to "doing". This has been done in other European cities and it is something we should do. In the meantime we should forget about high profile launches of plans for metros and light rail. Let us be honest with the public in a manner that the Government is so singularly incapable of being.
The future for Dublin transport over the next five years is buses and bus lanes as nothing else will be possible within that timeframe. We need more quality buses and lanes for them to run on. We need to expedite the introduction of competition for routes to improve efficiency and to add to the capacity of the carriage system. I will sup port the introduction of such competition. We must expedite the introduction of quality bus corridors and clear the planning bottlenecks which are holding them up. Let us not get bogged down on the issue of ownership of CIE. Despite the loss of public confidence in CIE, privatisation is a side issue, a distraction. Competition should go some way to resolving the issues which arise here. If the Minister put as much energy into this issue as she put into public relations exercises we could have made considerable progress in recent years.
The one thing that is clear is that if public transport is to be a serious option for Dublin it will require considerable investment and a clear indication from the Government, particularly in terms of a pricing mechanism, that it intends to prioritise public over private transport. Public transport is, in part, what my party's policy statement "New Direction, New Priorities" is about. Subvention to pay for public transport is what that policy is about. Integrated ticketing on foot of competition is an absolute must. We cannot allow cherry-picking of routes by private operators either. I make no bones about it, we will get competition only if we are prepared to subsidise service delivery.
I want to refer to taxis. I spoke about the need for honesty and coming clean with the public. The relationship between Fianna Fáil and elements in the taxi industry, particularly in Dublin, has been one of the most sordid in recent years. The extent of support for Fianna Fáil through advertising on taxis during the last election is a case for banning corporate or business donations to politicians. Never has a financial link between donation and delivery been so clear. However, for Fianna Fáil the link with taxi drivers is no longer expedient. If one puts aside the bleatings of Deputies Callely and Noel Ahern, which usually come to nothing, we can see that taxi drivers are being set aside by Fianna Fáil, which is hardly able to face them given its hypocrisy on the issue.
I am not a supporter of deregulation elsewhere in the economy so I will not support it in this case either. Standards in the taxi industry should be regulated. The cars that operate it and the fares that apply should also be regulated as it is in the public interest. However, I am opposed to the regulation of numbers within the industry. Market demands must be met and the availability of more plates will serve to increase demand. On a first reading, the Minister's proposals seem to meet the criteria outlined by me and I welcome that. However, there are losers in the process. Many taxi drivers have invested huge sums in gaining access to this industry and they will regard themselves as the losers this evening. I make no bones about it, responsibility for their fate lies in the hands of Fianna Fáil and, in particular, the Taoiseach.
The mini-CTC affair is a scandal of enormous proportions. It involves an open-ended contract for the laying of cables and the installation of a new signalling system to improve safety for rail travellers. It involves a contract where the terms allowed the price to grow from £16 million to £40 million. It involves a private operator, Mr. O'Brien of Esat, being allowed to gazump CIE on its own track in its own territory, thereby costing CIE millions of pounds in additional costs and giving Mr. O'Brien and Esat access to the rail network for its fibre optic cable. I am sure he is laughing all the way to the bank.
It involves the Minister, Deputy O'Rourke, who either knew the details at an early stage of the scandal and kept it to herself or who was so incompetent that she was not aware of a £25 million overspend on a contract within her remit. She certainly knew about the scandal a year ago and did nothing about it.
When the Opposition prised the information about the scandal out of her she immediately tried to get rid of the hot potato by asking the Joint Committee on Public Enterprise to investigate it. Why did she not do so when she first became aware of the scandal? In any other country in Europe a Minister who had treated her obligations in such a blasé fashion would have been forced to resign.
On the basis of all the evidence over the past three and a half years, I regret I have to conclude that the Minister, Deputy O'Rourke, is no longer capable of doing the demanding job her remit requires. Perhaps she is tired or suffering from burnout similar to the Tánaiste. In any event she is not doing her job, but that does not prevent her displaying quite amazing arrogance as was evidenced recently at the conclusion of Second Stage of the Aviation Regulation Bill, 2000. A total of 51 Members contributed to the debate, yet the Minister decided not to come into the House to reply. Instead she gave a five minute script to the Minister of State, which ignored all the contributions that had been made. It was an insult to the House. We got another taste of that arrogance this evening when she again did not remain in the House to listen to a debate under her remit.
