A member of the National Bus and Rail Union (NBRU) national executive has defended Friday's wildcat secondary picketing of Dublin Bus and Iarnród Éireann depots. Sean Thunder, a bus driver based at Broadstone, Dublin, said: "What happened on Friday I make no apologies to anybody for."
He said that the secondary picketing “had to happen. I really don’t know what’s going to happen next”. He added the drivers themselves organised Friday’s protests.
“You go down on the picket line for eight days, and nothing is happening,” he said. “I apologise to the individual travelling public. I really do. You wake up in the morning and your service is gone. But I’m going to wake up some morning and my job will be gone.”
Mr Thunder said drivers did not get huge wages.
“I earned €42,600 last year. I took home somewhere between €600 and €640 a week,” he said. “With the cuts that they’re proposing, I’m looking at €500 a week. That’s just not sustainable.
“I would be better off on the dole. I would earn €350.80 a week if I stayed at home. But that’s not what any of us want to do. We want an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. My earliest start is 4 am and my latest finish is 2 am. I work Saturdays and Sundays. I work every second Sunday throughout the year, bank holidays and all.
“I transport everybody wherever they want to go. I’m like a counsellor. A public servant is what I am. It’s so unfair that the Government agenda is trying to privatise every service that we have.”
PBP conference
The NBRU representative, who has been with the company for nine years, was speaking at the People Before Profit (PBP) political party’s annual conference, which took place at Wynn’s Hotel, Dublin.
Eight NBRU and Siptu drivers attended the conference, where they were greeted by a standing ovation from about 200 delegates who repeatedly chanted the slogan “the workers united will never be defeated”.
Mr Thunder said the only way the dispute could be resolved was through the intervention of Minister for Transport Shane Ross and the National Transport Authority (NTA).
A second driver, John North, of Siptu, who is based in Kerry, said: "This is not a battle, it is a war."
Mr North said the secondary picketing was an “inconvenience to the people on the ‘Dort’ [sic] and those people that cannot think for themselves and actually say ‘do you know what, let’s get behind these people’ because it’s your future as well”.
He expressed his disappointment that PBP was the only party to show support when Bus Éireann drivers protested outside the Dáil. No rural TDs approached them or showed interest in the dispute.
Mr North said private company drivers were not going to drive the service “I drive from Waterville to Cahersiveen to Killarney twice a day, carrying old age pensioners, people with special needs”.
Pay cut
He added that the company and the Minister for Transport expected him to take a 30 per cent pay cut, “and it just can’t be done”.
Mr North said “to all students, all the working-class people, we are sorry, apologetic to yourselves. We don’t want to be out on strike, but unfortunately we were forced to.”
PBP TD Bríd Smith said, to sustained applause and cheers, that she was “immensely proud of what they did on Friday”.
Ms Smith, a former bus driver and bus conductor with Dublin Bus and the NBRU’s first female branch secretary, said Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford city, and other towns and villages, had been without any public transport for the past eight days.
She said “they were very quiet in the Dáil and very quiet in the media until they shut Dublin down, and they did a fine job”.
Ms Smith added: “Actually, what they did was to show that solidarity that people can stick together and can be united and can fight and win, and [that’s] still a hugely important element of the working class of the 21st century.”
