Operated by Go Ahead, it connects the peninsula to Swords.
When Corina Johnston picked up the phone on Friday to talk about how the bus service in Donabate was letting the peninsula down, she didn’t mince her words.
The situation was dire, said the local Labour councillor. “The bus is so bad.”
She was talking about the 33b, a service operated by the company Go-Ahead Ireland, which links the peninsula to Swords.
Over the past few weeks, it has been cancelled time and time again, said Johnston.
Throughout May, there were only 13 days when Go-Ahead didn’t need to cancel a 33b bus, she was told by a spokesperson for the company in an email sent 12 June.
She has been inundated with messages from would-be passengers, via email, Facebook, and text, she says.
“They were angry,” she says. “They might go out to Swords for a meal with their partner, and they can’t get home. So they’re having to fork out €30 for a taxi.”
Her son got stranded down in Swords one afternoon in early June, she says. “Three buses didn’t show up.”
Donabate is linked to the city centre and neighbouring towns like Malahide and Balbriggan via the Dart, but its only connection to Swords is the 33b.
Locals in Portrane, meanwhile, are also dependent on the 33b bus to get them to and from their nearest Dart station.
Asked about the problems in May, a spokesperson for Go Ahead Ireland said on Tuesday that the company had had difficulty in sourcing mechanics at the start of the year. That meant buses took longer to service, they said.
But they did not specifically address what had caused the number of cancellations in May.
A shortage of bus drivers and mechanics has continued to plague the transport sector more broadly, Minister for Transport Darragh O’Brien said in the Dáil on 26 June. He said that over the past 12 to 18 months, it’s been an issue.
“My Department has established a dedicated multi-stakeholder taskforce to identify solutions and address these workforce challenges,” said O’Brien, a Fianna Fáil TD.
In fact, recruitment– and staff retention – issues date back even further. In 2022, the heads of Dublin Bus and Go-Ahead appeared in front of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport and Communications to explain what they were doing to deal with staff shortages and service issues.
Go-Ahead Ireland has been operating the 33b bus service, as well as 23 other services in the Outer Dublin Metropolitan area, since October 2018.
The company is a subsidiary of the Go-Ahead Group, a multinational company based out of Newcastle in England.
The National Transport Authority (NTA) awarded Go-Ahead a contract in April 2018 to operate routes in the Outer Dublin Metropolitan Area, according to the NTA website. The contract was later extended.
In January 2025, the company signed a letter of intent with the NTA for a new contract to operate routes in the Outer Dublin Metropolitan Area, Go-Ahead Ireland accounts show.
That service is set to launch in October 2025, the financial statements say.
Go-Ahead made a loss of €6.25m for the 18 months ending 31 December 2023, the statement says, with the main contributor to this being significant inflationary pressure on operating costs, the documents say.
The company expects that the new contract should see its turnover increase by approximately €50 million, with an increase of 175 vehicles on their existing fleet of 225 and 500 drivers on top of the current 578 or so, the statements say.
Meanwhile, cancellations of Go-Ahead’s 33b were becoming commonplace earlier this year and affecting off-peak times, Social Democrats Councillor Paul Mulville says.
“Late mornings, late afternoons, leaving people stranded all over the place,” he says.
That led Johnston, the Labour councillor, to meet with the company back in February, she said. “They did confirm that there were issues with the recruitment of drivers and mechanics.”
But they assured her that the issue would be resolved within a matter of weeks, she said. “The service improved within a short period of time, and then it went back to square one.”
Service reliability dipped slightly in the following months.
Go-Ahead faces penalties if it misses more than 2 percent of the kilometres that it is scheduled to run, according to the NTA’s reliability report on the company’s services for 2022 to 2024.
In a letter to Johnston on 10 June, the Go-Ahead spokesperson noted that the percentage of contracted kilometres that the 33b had not run but should have had gone slightly up from 0.97 percent in March to 1.18 percent in May.
Those lost kilometres in May were due to mechanical issues, a Go-Ahead spokesperson said on Tuesday.
The company has lowered the percentage of kilometres lost drastically, with the rate dropping from 15.2 percent between June and July 2022 to 1.6 percent between May and June 2024, according to the NTA’s reliability report.
Kilometres lost do not capture all of the buses that don’t run though. Those that aren’t run for reasons that the NTA judge to be outside the operator’s control aren’t counted.
On 26 June, Labour TD Duncan Smith asked Minister for Transport O’Brien for a proposal to ensure the peninsula got a more reliable bus service as, in May, commuters had been left stranded and forced to take taxis.
The Fianna Fáil minister didn’t directly address the high rate of cancelled buses in May. He mostly talked about earlier in the year.
Go-Ahead experienced difficulties in maintaining its service levels, “particularly in the first quarter of this year, primarily due to a shortage of mechanics”, he said.
Previously, Go-Ahead reported that it had a driver turnover rate of about 25 percent, Andrew Edwards, managing director of Go Ahead Ireland told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport and Communications in November 2022.
To remedy the current problem of sourcing mechanics, the company was flying mechanics in from its operators in the United Kingdom and securing technical support from external sources, Minister O’Brien said last Thursday.
The situation, O’Brien said, had since improved “significantly”, “with fleet availability returning to normal within a relatively short period”.
Since January, the company has reported eight new engineering staff joined them, while 129 drivers started in their driving school, he said. “In addition, Go-Ahead have completed overseas recruitment with 10 engineers expected to start in September 2025.”
Despite the recent operational challenges, the NTA was confident in Go-Ahead’s capacity and capability to deliver services, he said
“Recent customer satisfaction surveys indicate that overall satisfaction with Go-Ahead’s services in Dublin remains strong, outperforming other large bus operators providing services on behalf of the NTA,” he said.
Future years should see more changes to the bus network around Donabate.
Phase 9 of the BusConnects network redesign – which is currently scheduled for rollout in autumn 2026 – would see the 33b service replaced, an NTA spokesperson said on Tuesday.
Although, according to the BusConnects revised redesign proposal, published in October 2019, the 33b’s replacement would be mostly similar, with its main difference being an extension to continue past Swords to Dublin Airport.
“The overall speed at which [the network redesign] is being delivered is determined by operator readiness and funding,” the NTA spokesperson said.
In the meantime, construction is due to start soon on a new depot in Dublin 15 for the northern part of the county, the Go-Ahead spokesperson wrote on 10 June.
That depot will be able to provide more drivers and mechanics closer to the peninsula, they wrote.
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