Opening Address to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport and Communications Wednesday 15th October 2025
David Conway, CTTC Chairperson and Brendan Crowley, Vice Chairperson
On behalf of the members of the CTTC, I would like to thank the Chair, Deputy Murphy and the Committee for inviting us to present here today, and for providing us with an opportunity to discuss the very serious issues affecting commercial bus operators in Ireland.
By way of introduction, my name is David Conway, l am the Chairperson of the Coach Tourism and Transport Council of Ireland, otherwise known as the CTTC, and I am joined here today by Vice Chairperson of the CTTC, Brendan Crowley of Wexford Bus, and Executive Committee member JJ Kavanagh of JJ Kavanagh and Sons.
I will now ask the Vice Chair to deliver our opening statement.
The Coach Tourism and Transport Council of Ireland is the country’s largest representative body for commercial bus operators. We are a pro-active organisation focused on delivering efficient and sustainable transport connectivity in Ireland. Although the public transport sector plays a vital role in Irish society, they are supported every day by our members in the private sector. In essence, we help keep Ireland connected.
As a sector, we support more than 11,000 jobs across every constituency and region in Ireland, and our activities have sustained businesses across scheduled service routes, as well as carrying out school transport services. The expansion of the Young Adult Leap Card to commercial operators has been a positive development, benefiting both passengers and operators. However, extending the Child Leap Card and the free travel scheme for children under 9 to commercial operators is now essential to ensure that children in rural Ireland can also benefit from these fare reductions.
The commercial bus and coach industry has approximately 1,800 licensed operators in Ireland. We support businesses across rural Ireland that would otherwise have limited employment opportunities, while the entire sector generates more than €620 million annually. The commercial bus industry undertakes 75 million passenger journeys every year across scheduled services, school transport and coach tourism.
We are here today to discuss Rural Transport and essential connectivity for these communities, including both the challenges and the opportunities facing the sector. Many of our members have, for years, been engaged in the delivery of rural public transport on a commercial basis. In the vast majority of cases, these services were developed where there was little or no alternatives, thus filling a vital role in terms of community connectivity and social cohesion. Today, we continue to provide and support, both directly and indirectly, valuable employment across our country.
All of these services have been developed without financial support from the state. In recent years many of these services have come under pressure due to the Connecting Ireland Rural Mobility Plan. As the connected Ireland network, largely made up of Local Link services continues to develop there is far greater potential for indirect competition for passengers where services overlap or operate in very close proximity to each other. The commercial realities are that the lower fares and often higher frequency of the government funded services cannot be matched by licensed operators, and therefore the future of many of these services are in severe doubt. I want to make it clear; we are fully supportive of the Connecting Ireland plan. In fact, the majority of those services are provided by our members through NTA contracts, thus providing reliable revenue streams that has allowed significant investment in a modern bus fleet across the country. However, while this is all positive, we are concerned that there is an urgent need for the state to devise a fair and transparent process to manage the transition of services that are destabilised or no longer financially viable from licensed services to become part of the publicly supported network.
This transition must consider long-term investment, both financial and non-financial, of the operators who have provided services, in many cases, for decades. Under 9 Fares Successive budgets have contained measures to reduce the cost of fares on public transport. We very much welcome any measures designed to encourage people to use bus services. Our members, who provide regular, reliable services on hundreds of licensed routes, have for many years participated in the DSP Free Travel Scheme, and we also participated in the Young Adult Fare scheme since it was launched in 2022. For reasons unknown to us, we have been excluded from the under 9s free travel initiative. Considering that our members provide many rural services as well as urban services in towns and cities across the country, we believe that the exclusion of commercial services from this scheme unfairly disadvantages thousands of families and children as the cost of living continues to rise. Furthermore, it undermines the efforts to change consumer behaviours and deter the use of private vehicles which will have obvious, positive impacts on driving Ireland’s emissions down.
We estimate that cost of inclusion is less than €1 million per annum from a Department of Transport budget of €3.9 billion (2025). It is also important to note that the benefit of inclusion accrues to the end user, the hard-pressed parents, and not the bus operators. The technology to enable inclusion is already in place through the Leap Card operating system, and our members are ready and willing to work with the NTA team to implement these changes should the Minister for Transport amend the policy in this regard.
Decarbonisation of our Fleet
There is no doubt that efficient decarbonisation is one of the most important and significant challenges facing the industry in the coming years. The massive capital costs associated with transitioning away from diesel have been clearly demonstrated by the completed NTA sponsored projects in both Athlone and Limerick. We welcome the allocation of €83 million for the decarbonisation of commercial bus fleets contained in the Budget 2026. We look forward to hearing in greater detail about how this funding will be distributed, and whether monies will be ring-fenced to encourage the transition for bus operators. However, given what we know about the high costs of transition, multiples of this allocation will be required over the coming years.
To make investments in electric vehicles more viable, we must see a situation where the duration of contracts, such as Local Link currently averaging 4 years, is extended. In our pre-budget submission, we did propose that consideration be given to using HVO as a transitional fuel that would reduce life-cycle carbon emissions by over 90%. This could have been made possible through a Diesel to HVO equalisation measure. Unfortunately, our wish was not granted on this occasion and instead we have been hit by an increase in carbon tax on our diesel costs.
Staffing
The recruitment and retention of drivers remain a challenge for many of our operators. The CTTC is actively engaged in the Department of Transport’s Workforce Taskforce, which was set up to devise strategies to tackle staff and recruitment shortages which appear to be a pan European, if not a global challenge. We believe that the current age limits are too restrictive. We would like to see the lower age limit for drivers reduced, which may be with or without limits of operation, such as those that apply in other countries.
Conclusion
CTTC members have a long history of developing and delivering reliable rural public transport services. Now at a time of heightened public investment, customer expectation and demand for services, we’re committed to working will all other stakeholders to deliver a network that could be a source of national pride. All we ask in return, is to be considered and treated as equal partners and that the contribution of our members is acknowledged. The challenges faced by our operators should be acknowledged and we would like proactive engagement with the Minister and the Department of Transport to overcome these challenges on a fair basis. In essence, we want to be a partner with the Government and the Oireachtas.
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