If you’ve ever wondered why Dublin Bus persists with all the adverts on its buses telling the world it is hiring, meet Karl King McDonnell. He recalls the day he decided to leave the logistics company he used to work for.
They had been short of staff for six months or so, and those who were left were having to make up the shortfall. On the day in question, King McDonnell was in a fridge labelling 4,000 yoghurts. “Usually, there’d be a load of us doing it, and we’d knock it out in an hour, but it was just me.”
He approached his manager about when new staff would be hired and was told they were trying, to be patient, but then two articulated lorries arrived in the warehouse. He realised he’d be emptying them alone too.
“I said there and then I’d be leaving; I was going to look for something else. Then a bus went by with Join Dublin Bus on it. It was like a eureka moment.”
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It’s two years on and he hasn’t looked back, he says. The driving part came easy enough as he’d driven trucks for the logistics company. Shifts were nothing new either, because he’d had a spell at Tesco where the first delivery could be at 5am or 6am. The money, about €50,000 per annum including shift allowances and Sunday premiums, is better than he’d been on.
“And I discovered something about myself,” he says. “I get a kick out of helping people, whether it’s bringing some school kids to the zoo, or old people to the hospital. It’s nice. I didn’t know that about myself.”
He has learned a few phrases in different languages to field common queries at the airport, one of the routes he sometimes covers, and developed some strategies for de-escalating potentially difficult situations with troublesome passengers. He says, with a considerable sense of empathy, that “you don’t know what’s happened to them in their day”.
He says he gets “a buzz” out of the busy days, getting big crowds to concerts and the like, and is clearly taken with the advice and support he has received from colleagues: “It’s like family,” he says.
Not quite as much like a family as it is for the company’s chief people officer, Barbara Carroll, though. Her grandmother worked in head office, as a cleaner, she thinks. Her grandfather and uncle were body builders - assembly/maintenance workers - in the Broadstone depot while another uncle was a driver and a third a conductor.
She grew up hearing stories of life around the company, she says and “I do feel that it’s in the blood”. Although it’s taken a little while to follow in all of those footsteps after stints in construction, hospitality and, most recently, the Law Society.
Nudging staff to recommend working in the company to relatives is one of the many strategies employed to address the shortage of drivers that has persisted since services returned to capacity after Covid.
The company has just recruited almost 100 drivers from South Africa and expects to hire from there again as part of a wider international outlook. The home market remains the primary focus, with potential to add to its current tally of 8 per cent women drivers.
Three open days for women are scheduled for the coming weeks, although female applicants are more likely to express concern about antisocial or violent behaviour, with Siptu having highlighted a recent attack on a driver.
Carroll says the company works with the managers, unions and An Garda Síochána to support drivers and minimise risks.
King McDonnell says he has never had an encounter he felt was really threatening and believes the majority of passengers “have your back. But it’s the same as working anywhere in the city centre, in a shop, a coffee shop. You don’t know who you’re going to meet. Most people, though, just want to go where they want to go.”
