The minister of transport has ruled out creating a special transport police unit and applauded Dublin Bus’s decision to use security officers across its operations, reports Breaking News.
Every day in the afternoon, evening, and night, teams of security officers will ride the buses since there has been a noticeable rise in anti-social behaviour events.
With two specialised mobile units—one for Dublin’s northside and one for the south—the initiative will start as a 20-week test.
According to Eamon Ryan, a specialised unit of police for public transit was not necessary.
“I believe An Garda Siochana are the right people to police our transport systems as well as others,” the Green minister said, reports Breaking News.
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“But it’s also very good when public transport operators, as Dublin Bus are doing today, supplement that, putting extra services on so that people feel safe, feel secure. I feel that model works and we have really fast and close contact with the guards (An Garda Siochana), which is a critical part of that. We see it working on the Luas, we see it on the rail, I’m very glad that Dublin Bus are adding their own additional services to complement what the guards can do. What really works as well is community policing. When we have had difficulties in the past, what really stops it is when we work local community guards with Dublin Bus. So that when we do have a problem, that it’s bottom up, grassroots. You are not going to deny a community a service by all that behaviour and I think that is a key part to the solution as well,” he added, reports Breaking News.
He said this as the number of trips taken on public transport hit a record high, with more than a million people utilising it daily.
This indicates a 12% rise in comparison to the same time previous year.
Mr Ryan said: “We want to give a million thanks to the Irish people. For the first time ever, every day one million people buying a ticket for our trains, our buses in Dublin and around the country, city services, town services. It’s a phenomenal increase we are seeing in public transport. We had over 300 million passengers for the first time last year, but we will shatter that record this year. We agreed in the budget last week that we would keep going with rural services. Sixty new services last year, and same again this year. It is transforming rural Ireland. New town bus services – Mullingar and Ennis next up. Every time we put a town bus service up, we see a dramatic rise in demand,” reports Breaking News.
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