This morning NBRU reps across the city monitored routes our general secretary Dermot O’Leary said Just one percent of passengers were seen wearing facemasks on public transport this morning.

Reps from the National Bus and Rail Union surveyed commuters’ travel patterns, on the first day of the easement of lockdown measures to see how the easing of restrictions and the increase in busses on the routes would affect social distance measures put in place and the advice that citizens wear face coverings in public places such as on public transport.

Dermot O’Leary NBRU General secretary says extra services from Dublin Bus helped passengers to stay socially distant.

But he believes more should be done to encourage the use of face coverings on board:

“The wearing of facemasks or face barrier type masks was as low as 0.5% or 1% of the passengers that were travelling.

“So the issue in relation to facemasks is something that urgently needs to be addressed by government and it’s imperative that the issue is revisited”.

“We will be keeping a watching brief and again we’re calling on the government quite clearly and quite openly from the NBRU to issue instructions that the wearing of facemasks should be compulsory on all public transport.” Below we can see a representation of data collected across the city. Here the general secretary speaks to fm104 on this issue:

Further to that here is a snap shot of some of the compliance data obtained by the NBRU reps and we will continue to monitor the route in the interest of the health and safety of our members: