The cost of traffic gridlock in Dublin is running at £1.2 billion a year, up £200 million on estimates of two years ago, according to CIE.
Mr Michael McDonnell, group chief executive of CIE, told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Public Enterprise and Transport that the company had prepared a paper two years ago, using a standard international methodology, to quantify the ecological costs of the traffic crisis.
This took into account things like the cost of accidents, environmental damage and congestion, and at the time it was estimated at £1 billion. That figure has recently been updated to £1.2 billion.
He pointed out that the Government subvention to Bus Atha Cliath had been cut to a third of what it was in 1987, when inflation was taken into account. While acknowledging that the allocation of Government funds within CIE was a matter for the company, he said the total subvention to CIE had been cut by a third during that time.
He said that the Irish Government was highly unusual in Europe, and increasingly out of step with the US, in seeking to recover almost all the cost of public transport from fares. It was now widely recognised that public transport should be supported for both economic and social reasons. "They have decided that the principle of "the user pays" should apply to public transport."
He said this was a legitimate stance if the service provider could increase fares in line with increased costs. But this was not the case with Bus Atha Cliath.
"So the policy framework which we have been working with over the past decade is not one of the Government pays. It is not one of the user pays. It is a unique Irish one of nobody pays."