The 238 bus in Tyrrelstown is “canceled, canceled, canceled”, residents say

Ahmed Sherzai was waiting at a bus stop on a quiet residential street in Tyrrelstown at around 5.30pm on Saturday.

The sun has gone down. Rain has been falling on and off. This stop had no shelter, just a yellow pole.

Sherzai said the bus he was waiting for, the Dublin Bus-operated 40D, into the city centre, is supposed to come every 40 minutes on Saturdays like today. 

But now he has been waiting for an hour.

Sure, it’s not unusual for this to happen, Sherzai says. He waits around. Time ticks by.

The 40D into the city isn’t so bad, though, Sherzai says. The Go Ahead-operated 238 to Blanchardstown is the worst, he says. 

 Yes, resident Anna Kubiak had said earlier in Tyrrelstown about the 238 bus, “canceled, canceled, canceled”. 

Earlier that day in Finglas by the Royal canal, Festus Odeshina and his girlfriend were waiting at a bus stop, trying to do the opposite route: taking the 40D to Tyrrelstown. 

It was late, but not that late. He doesn’t really have an issue with the 40D he said, it’s the 238 that causes him the most issues.

Odeshina said he takes the 238 from his place to the gym, and it’s worse on Saturdays like today. 

“Come on, it might refuse to show up. Sometimes it doesn’t show up. And it takes a miracle for it to be on time. It’s the worst bus I've ever taken,” he said.

At a 13 January local area committee meeting, Solidarity Party Councillor John Burtchaell tabled a motion calling on the council to write to the National Transport Authority (NTA) to do something about the state of the buses in Tyrrelstown. 

Labour Party Councillor John Walsh, Sinn Féín Councillor Breda Hanaphy, and Fianna Fáil Councillor Tom Kitt spoke up in agreement.

The council should ask the NTA “to engage with the bus service providers for Tyrrelstown and Hollystown to improve the schedules for these areas which routinely are subject to buses being late or missing entirely from the schedule (ghost buses) and daily overcapacity issues”, the motion says.

How bad is the 238?

The 238 isn’t one of those routes that has a bus scheduled every 10 minutes or whatever, so if you miss one, you can just wait a few and catch the next. 

Most of the time there’s only one scheduled to arrive once an hour. So if you miss one, you’re really out of luck.

In the past six months, about 5.4 percent of Go Ahead Ireland’s buses running along the 238 route have been cancelled, according to the Bus Cancellations Dublin website.

That’s out of about 6,400 trips scheduled along the 238 route, says the website, which says it pulls its data from the NTA GTFS-Realtime API.

Of course, not all buses are marked as “cancelled”, some remain on the system as ghost buses that appear in the apps but never appear in real life. 

Wannabe passengers who know about the website noshowbus.ie and took the time to file a report on it, flagged 13 of those over the past six months. “Late for work, kids late for school,” one commented.

The 238 bus definitely hasn’t been living up to the NTA’s standards recently, according to figures sent by an NTA spokesperson on Monday.

The NTA awards contracts to operate bus routes to companies like Dublin Bus and Go Ahead Ireland. 

Then it measures how well they’re doing based on reliability (if the bus shows up) and punctuality (if the bus shows up on time). 

It measures reliability in terms of “lost kilometres”, that is, total scheduled services minus total operated services. 

The target is no more than 2 percent lost kilometres. Miss that, and there are financial consequences for the operator.

But during the third quarter of last year, the NTA spokesperson said, the Go Ahead failed to operate between 4.2 percent and 8.2 percent of 238 route kilometres it should have.  

And those figures likely do not capture all buses that don’t show up. If a bus loses kilometres for certain reasons that the NTA figures are out of the operators’ control, it doesn’t deduct those from the stats. 

The single biggest reason for non-deductible lost kilometres, a deep dive into the data for the fourth quarter of 2024 showed, is “abnormal congestion”. Traffic.

The reason for the poor performance, according to the NTA spokesperson on Monday? The same reasons the NTA and the operators have been giving now for years: a shortage of drivers and operators.

“To address these issues, Go-Ahead Ireland have onboarded 10 additional mechanics, and the Authority has seen improvement to services as of late,” the NTA spokesperson said. 

These staffing shortages have been “further exacerbated by an increase to inner city congestion”, she said. “The Authority sincerely apologises for the inconvenienced cause to passengers.”

Impacts

In her home in Tyrrelstown, Bernie Casey said the area has been poorly served by public transport since she moved here.

“When I came here, my son was a baby, and now he's, like, 23,” she said. And he’s struggling with the bus service himself now, it’s affecting his work, she said.

She pulls out a tin of biscuits and puts on the kettle for tea, as she gets into how the spotty bus service has affected her family and the community.

The 238 which is the only connector to Blanchardstown, the main local hub, only comes once an hour – and that’s theoretically.

Another problem is buses are often already full after the very first stop. Then they just pass by, and you’re left there at the bus stop with your arm out, watching it drive past.

She said some of her son’s friends have lost their jobs in Blanchardstown because they couldn’t get there reliably by bus, Casey said. 

Her son takes the 238 to his work at Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, Casey says. “And most mornings he's walking because he's left there,” she says, about a half hour walk.

She said it’s not just jobs either. The 238 brings a lot of people to health services, sometimes appointments they have waited for for months or even years.

“You know, they’ve been waiting so long for these appointments,” she said.  Then the bus doesn’t come, and they miss the appointments.

Steve O’Reilly, the head of the residents association, said residents have continuously logged issues with the 238 bus with the NTA but that doesn’t seem to have any impact.

Casey said similar: residents are told to log the issues with ghost buses and everything, and “nothing ever happens”.

BusConnects plans

The ongoing effort to redesign Dublin’s bus network, BusConnects, will bring two new services to Tyrrelstown, according to the NTA spokesperson. 

One is route B3, running every 12 minutes between Hollywoodrath, Tyrrelstown, Blanchardstown, the Navan Road and the city centre, then onwards towards Blackrock and Dún Laoghaire.

The other is route L62, running every 15–30 minutes between Broombridge and Blanchardstown via Finglas South, Hollywoodrath and Tyrrelstown.

“These services are currently planned for early 2027,”, she said. 

Although the buses will be scheduled to run more frequently than the dreaded hourly 238, there’s no knowing if the new buses will be more reliable, or punctual, of course. 

O’Reilly said that residents know the BusConnects changes are coming but they keep getting delayed. 

Bus Connects “was supposed to be implemented back in 2025, then it got pushed out to 2026 and now it's been pushed out to 2027,” he said. "It's not really good enough."

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.