Yup CIÉ is still in Celtic Tiger excess mode with all the talk about fleet replacement and supposedly life expired vehicles. Sure didn't BÉ downgrade quite a few VPs that were only ten years old onto schools last year. I wouldn't mind if it was something not particularly good like an SR or LC or VC300, but the VPs, along with the VCs before them are great buses and they would have been well able for five or six more years in service if they were overhauled and maintained properly. Buses in stark contrast to cars are extremely reliable things when looked after and a properly maintained bus will last 20 years in service.

Nowhere else in the developed world, not even in the US, does a fleet operator consider a 12 year old bus to have reached the end of its useful life, and God knows the US is fairly shocking when it comes to a culture of throwing away perfectly good cars, computers etc.

While a healthy number of Expressway coaches is essential for BÉ every year due to it operating fairly intensive schedules with its Expressway vehicles, the citybus and commuter fleet in either Dublin Bus or Bus Éireann is still very modern by fleet operator standards and neither company has what you would call life expired vehicles in service (bar a few SRs).

The only convincing argument for new buses for Dublin is to get the fleet to be 100% accessible, and that is only right. People in wheelchairs are just as entitled to use buses as the rest of us are, and low floor technology is enormously beneficial to those without wheelchairs too. I would love to see more VGs, but I would settle for some VTs as the new batch of buses for Dublin Bus.