Coronavirus and the effect on Public transport

GT89 wrote: »

But the NBRU's sole interest is to look out is to look out for it's members. I'm not sure your right in saying that the NBRU are more militant than SIPTU. I don't know either myself but are you saying that the NBRU are more likely to block a new bill than SIPTU how do you know that it would very depnd on the induvidual members I would imagine.

It's not hard to come to that conclusion, the NBRU are more militant than SIPTU.

Just look at the differing ways that the two unions have held Bus Connects and the number of arguments that the NBRU have had with people on twitter and the number of inflammatory or controversial posts from Dermot compared to his compatriots in SIPTU who you never see getting involved in tit for tat stuff like this. They just quietly get on with representing their members interests making their noises behind the scenes without having a mud slinging match in public.

The fact of the matter is the service provided by PSO operators is being paid in part by your and mine taxes. That's why we pay taxes to fund vital public services. Ashbourne Connect appear to be unhappy that they are not getting taxpayer funding when obivously they're services are not being deemed essential as they are not PSO just like BE Expressway and DB Airlink services. Now if Ashbourne wanted their slice of the pie from the taxpayer they could have submitted a tender for the multiple routes that the NTA have put out to tender in recent years.

I think you will find that the NBRU were firing shots at commercial operators for a good few days now and Ashbourne Connect have a right to defend themselves from such attacks. I do not think attacking the front line staff and calling DOL a thug was the right way to go about it, but you're not just going to sit there and take it whilst someone is trying to play politics at a time of national crisis in a way that could effect all that you have worked for and your staffs future.

Even Sinn Fein, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael among others have buried the hatchet and stopped trying to score cheap points for the time being realising that this is not a time to score points against each other and is a time to come together in National crisis since they realise that there is a time and a place for that and it's certainly not now.

I don't think anyone believes that DB and BE are operating out of the goodness of their hearts. They are doing so because they are told by the government that they have to provide a service otherwise they would risk losing their funding or having their services put out to tender.

The simple thing is public operators continue to operate because they are paid to do so and they know that they will have their losses covered. Private operators are not because they are not paid to do so and won't.

The misleading picture being painted is that the CIE group of companies continues to operate services out of the goodness of their heart because they are public and the private ones are not because they are greedy which is laughable because believe me, whether they are operating services or not, they're still losing money hand over fist daily because they haven't got the credit line that public operators have got.

Commercial businesses up and down the land in almost every industry there is, have the same problems as transport operators, a massive drop in demand, large costs and no hope of it changing anytime soon. All of they are cutting back hours and services etc to ensure that they survive, protect the health of the nation and to ensure that people have a job to go back to when this is over because heaven knows, our economy needs these businesses to survive if we want to limit the economic damage.

Companies in any industry continuing to trade till the point they go bust because they're losing fortunes every week when there is no demand for their services will not do our countries economy any favours and will just set the recovery back further. It might help certain people progress their ideology, but if one feels that is more important than the economy we really do have to ask ourselves who really are the selfish ones in all of this.