A couple spat at a taxi driver and kicked his car in Dublin city centre after he requested that they wear a mask in his cab.
According to the chief executive of taxi firm Lynk Ireland, Noel Ebbs, the request by the company’s taxi driver to the two standing at the window of the car “hit the big red button for them and the couple just exploded”.
He said: “The driver said to them ‘listen, I live with my elderly mother and without a mask, I can’t take the risk’. They started kicking his car and spitting at him and calling him all sorts of names.”
Mr Ebbs said that the incident occurred at College Green in Dublin city centre.
He was commenting on complaints made by passengers to the National Transport Authority (NTA) concerning taxi drivers who refuse to wear masks. He said: “There is no doubt that it has been a two-way street."
Masks now mandatory
The wearing of masks is now mandatory for drivers and passengers and Mr Ebbs said this has given drivers comfort. “It is much less stressful going to work for drivers knowing that passengers and drivers have to wear masks. It is the right move and it is a shame that it wasn’t made earlier.”
Prior to masks being made mandatory, Mr Ebbs said that “certainly in early evenings and nighttime, drivers did have a lot of problems with the public when making a simple request to wear a mask”.
He said the College Green incident occurred in the summer of last year when Covid-19 restrictions were eased. “At the time, there was still a strong cohort of people who believed that Covid-19 was some sort of conspiracy and that it didn’t exist. I don’t think there are too many of those around now.
“Even under normal circumstances, it is an awful thing to spit at a person, but during Covid it is even worse.”
Mr Ebbs said none of the spittle landed on the driver and instead landed on his car but the driver drove off and left his position in the rank in order to get away from the young couple. “It was an assault - and that kind of explosive reaction is not common, but it does happen and very rarely do taxi drivers report it. The stoic attitude is ‘head down, right, I need to get on with this”. It is seen as part of the job, part of the risk and move on.”
Complaints
Mr Ebbs said he had a personal experience of booking a taxi from a small company on the outskirts of Dublin last year, where the driver refused to wear a mask. "He told me ‘I don’t believe in them. This is a conspiracy’.”
Complaints lodged with the NTA last year show that one taxi passenger who opened a window for ventilation was told to close the window by a ‘cold’ taxi driver after he told the customer that the Covid-19 pandemic does not exist.
The complaints to the NTA, made available following a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, reveal a very small cohort of taxi-drivers who were Covid-19 ‘deniers’ at the time.
One passenger told the NTA that a driver “refused to wear a face mask. He spent the entire trip claiming the Coronavirus does not exist”.
Another passenger complained to the NTA that “the driver wasn’t wearing a mask and there was no Perspex screen. The driver mentioned he had returned from a non-green list country and wasn’t isolating”.
On the impact of Covid-19 on the taxi business, Mr Ebbs said: “We are back at 40% now on our pre-Covid business and at its worst it was at 30% during the first lockdown. I expect over the next two weeks to be back at 30% because the numbers are dropping daily and the ‘stay at home’ message has finally arrived home and people get it. You can see it every single day now. The numbers are falling, falling, falling.”
He said: “Thank God for the Covid payments because companies and self-employed people would be destroyed without it.”
