THE LOCAL LINK bus picks up Mary Donoghue from her home in the village of Dooagh in Achill, Co Mayo, every Tuesday morning for a trip to Castlebar to do her shopping.

The bus collects Donoghue from her door at around 9am – depending on how many stops it needs to make beforehand – and drives the 70 or so kilometres to Castlebar, collecting others along the way.

“We’re so familiar with the driver now that we can ring him or we can ring Michael [O’Haire, who runs the service] and say we’ll be with them that day,” says Donoghue.

“We go to Castlebar with him and get our shopping done and have a cuppa or whatever and it’s a while out and a chat with everyone on the bus.

“And when everything is done, he takes us home again and we’re left to the door with our shopping. It’s absolutely brilliant. You meet people and the whole service is excellent.”

The bus runs twice a week – on Tuesdays and Saturdays – and is one of 45 Demand Responsive Routes operated by TFI Local Link Mayo, the organisation that coordinates the service.

“The majority of our services are demand responsive, so they’re door-to-door pick up. They pick up people from their own door and bring them to local towns and villages,” says Sarah Togher, manager with Local Link Mayo.

As well as these routes, which run from rural areas into local towns and villages across the county, there is a regular bus route that runs twice daily from Belmullet to Castlebar.

Michael Mc Laughlin Michael Mc Laughlin

TFI Local Link Mayo is the Transport Coordination Unit (TCU) for the county. It is one of 15 such units managing Local Links in counties across the country.

This initiative has been around in some form for the past 20 years, and transport officials say it will play an increasing role in meeting Ireland’s public transport needs and climate goals in the years to come.

Rural transport

Local Link is managed by the National Transport Authority (NTA) on behalf of the Department of Transport, and is funded through the Public Service Obligation (PSO).

It was first set up as the Rural Transport Initiative (RTI) in 2002, a pilot project aimed at addressing the issue of unmet transport needs in rural Ireland. In 2007, the Rural Transport Programme was established to build upon the RTI.

Transport connectivity in rural Ireland, particularly in the western part of the country, is frequently criticised as inadequate to meet people’s needs.

A 2019 report from the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Rural and Community Development criticised the lack of “joined up thinking” in the past around transport service provision in rural areas.

“For too long, infrastructural development has been concentrated in the east,” committee chairman Joe Carey said in the preface of the report.

“This has resulted in a situation where all roads lead to the capital but there is poor connectivity between regional areas.”

The Rural Transport Programme has aimed to address these public transport issues. It was originally managed by Pobal, but management was taken over by the NTA in 2013, following a review.

The NTA cut the 35 rural transport community groups which had previously managed the service to 17 Transport Coordination Units, and in 2017 it formally launched the Local Link brand.

Today 15 TCUs deliver Local Link in conjunction with 400 private bus operators.

The TCUs are funded by the NTA. According to the NTA, Local Link provided 2.5 million passenger journeys across the country in 2019.

Types of service

There are currently around 1,350 Demand Responsive routes in operation and they are “very much the essence of what Local Link services do”, according to Tim Gaston, director of Public Transport Services with the NTA.

“People who live in rural Ireland… register with their local office and they will then know that the Demand Responsive services will run on particular days of the week,” says Gaston.

“They would contact the office the day before and say yes, I need to be picked up, and that would go onto the list for the driver for the route that morning.”

As well as this, over the past three years Local Link has started running regular timetabled buses. There are currently 45 such routes in operation.

The 2020 Programme for Government contains commitments to expand the Local Link and to recognise its importance for “public transport linkages between rural areas”.

Gaston says that it will play a central role in the coming years in expanding transport connectivity in rural areas.

“We want to see a very significant expansion to address what is a deficit,” he says. “We should call it as it is, there are places in Ireland that are just not well connected.”

A large piece of research around this – called Connecting Ireland – is ongoing from the NTA and is due to go out to public consultation before the end of the year.

As well as improving connectivity, Gaston says that Local Link will play a significant role in helping Ireland to meet its climate and emissions reduction targets.

“It’s very much aimed at both of those objectives. One is to help Ireland to address its carbon emissions challenge and emissions reductions,” he says.

“And the other is to provide better connectivity so that people can live in rural Ireland and still do the things that people need to do – get to work and the hospital, go to visit friends, go shopping, seven days a week, including services in the evening and weekends.”

Local services

As well as providing public transport, Local Links can offer different services depending on the need in the area. In Mayo, for example, Local Link was part of the Covid Community Response Forum which was coordinated by Mayo County Council.

“We delivered over 30,000 deliveries across the county during the Covid-19 pandemic,” says Sarah Togher.

“We would organise medical supplies, groceries or anything that was needed.”

For Mary Donoghue, Local Link provides a vital transport link to Castlebar, and she says it is very important to her and the entire Achill community.

“We would be lost without it. Absolutely lost,” she says.

“Because I don’t drive and there’s quite a few of the people on it who don’t drive so you would be lost without it. It’s brilliant for it, for the whole of the island now, it’s excellent.”

This work is co-funded by Journal Media and a grant programme from the European Parliament. Any opinions or conclusions expressed in this work is the author’s own. The European Parliament has no involvement in nor responsibility for the editorial content published by the project. For more information, see here.