‘Every driver has a story’: Bus, rail workers face drug dealing and threats of violence at work

Dublin Bus driver Suzanne Armstrong was passing a series of parked cars when suddenly a bicycle shot out from between two cars and went straight under her bus.
In shock, she brought the bus to a halt, her mind racing as she sought to reassure herself there was nobody on the bike; that it was, in fact, riderless.
In her peripheral vision she saw three youths cheering and laughing as they emerged from between the cars and ran away.
Ms Armstrong spoke about the incident at Liberty Hall in Dublin on Tuesday at the launch of Siptu proposals for a uniformed public transport police in Dublin, Cork and Limerick.
The trade union is calling for 100 uniformed officers with powers of arrest and detention to be deployed, creating a force modelled on the airport police.
Ms Armstrong said among the “daily risks” faced by staff was drug taking and drug dealing on buses.
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“I went over a speed bump once and some fellas upstairs at the back came down and abused me because they were injecting at the time,” she said.
“Every driver has a story. It is normalised but it shouldn’t be. It is not normal.”
As for the incident regarding the bike, when she radioed her control in Dublin Bus a man appeared at her window and threatened her with violence, should she attempt to move the bus. It appears the youths had been tormenting the neighbourhood and “this man didn’t want the bus to move before the guards came,” said Ms Armstrong. “I wasn’t going to move it but he threatened me and said he could call out loads of people if I tried to move the bus.”
The incident happened in a north Dublin suburb but Ms Armstrong said “it can happen anywhere, it has happened to my colleagues”.
Fellow transport worker Alan O’Brien, who is a ticket inspector with Luas, said during Covid he asked a passenger to wear a mask, and was set upon by the passenger and his four friends. Mr O’Brien received 15 kicks to his head. Because it was New Year’s Eve and during the Covid pandemic, he could not immediately go to hospital and could not even see his own GP for four days. He recovered at home. “I was lucky,” he said.
Siptu called for a national transport police force last February last but despite what it says was “broad support from most politicians and political parties” it has not seen any evidence of the Government developing a policy on the issue.
Adrian Kane Siptu divisional organiser said the trade union intended to make a national transport police force an election issue. “Our political system has to be seen to react and to solve problems”, he said. “But the system has a problem, it takes too long to react,” he said.