Madam, - Seamus Brennan is an otherwise competent Minister for Transport but his insistence on taking on the CIÉ unions and pushing forward his privatisation agenda is misguided.
His course of action will be supported by many who dislike the unions and, like myself, are unhappy with the transport service provided by these State monoliths.However, the real litmus test of any change should be its effect on the day-to-day experiences of people who use public transport. What we want is a frequent service, low fares, comfortable conditions and buses and trains that arrive on time.
Taking on the unions will not achieve any of these goals and neither will privatisation, which is likely to mean the ending of unprofitable, but socially necessary, bus and train routes.
The Minister would do better to tackle the real problems that commuters face. He could do that by introducing congestion charges for cars entering the city centre, increasing the frequency of major bus routes to one every five minutes, sorting out the chronic frequency problems of the DART and delivering Luas on time.
If we could get lone car commuter out of his comfort zone and on to a bus, train or tram, Dublin would be a much better place to live and work in. That is the real goal. Privatisation is merely a distraction. - Yours, etc.,
PAUL RAFFERTY,
Malahide,
Co Dublin.
Madam, - David Begg, general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, writes (Opinion, February 13th): "In the case of Dublin Bus the Minister wants to open up the market to competition. This concept was accepted by the National Partnership Transport Forum a couple of years ago so, as such, there is no principled objection to market opening on our side".
Writing to the CIÉ trade unions at the end of January, the secretary general of the Department of Transport, Julie O'Neill, said the unions had already accepted the objective of "regulated market opening" in bus transport, through their participation in the public transport partnership forum.
Last August the national conference of SIPTU, at which I was a delegate, accepted a motion from its Dublin Bus branch which stated simply: "Conference calls on the Minister for Transport to set aside his unilateralist and illogically driven 'experiment' to privatise/franchise Dublin Bus."
As the national conference is the policy-making body of SIPTU, that policy Motion would, for ICTU's biggest union, overtake or clarify any objectives agreed to a couple of years ago.
The next motion accepted by the SIPTU conference, from the railway services division, stated: "Conference calls on the national executive council to actively oppose any form of privatisation in either Iarnród Éireann or Bus Éireann". - Yours, etc.,
DES DERWIN, Comyn Place, Dublin 9.