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Matthews Coach Hire eye London 2012 bid on back of latest award
MATTHEWS Coach Hire have set their sights on supplying buses at the 2012 London Olympics after picking up an Environmental Sustainability award at the Small Firms Association's National Small Business Awards last week.
The Inniskeen-based company have become famed for their bus service from Dundalk to Dublin's Parnell Street, but rather than resting on his laurels, founder Paddy Matthews is eyeing bigger and better things.
"We are completing an invitation to tender for work in the 2012 London Olympics," he said.
"It would be a major thing for us but then again we're also tendering for a lot of other work. We're always looking at possible new routes and this would be just something different for us.
"It would be like representing the country in a way but a lot of work goes into these things because they look for so many different criteria. The award we got from Brian Cowen last Thursday night will help but whether we're successful or not it's a big learning curve. It would be good for our CV though to do it.
"We don't want to be an English company though. We're very much Irish but it would be nice to carry a winning Irish team," he said.
Matthews insisted his company was always looking at different ways to improve their service.
"We don't follow standards, we set them," he said.
"We're always looking at ways to grow but a massive effort goes into it too. It was nice to get the award last week because we certainly put the effort in to make it work.
"It's a fact now that apart from walking or cycling travelling by coach is the greenest way to travel. We try to maximize that by keeping our buses as modern as we can and we embrace all the new technology that comes along every year but I think our customers appreciate that and we appreciate them too.
"In 2002 our return fare to Dublin was p13.30. Today it's p12 and that's down to the amount of people we carry.
"Our oldest coach is 2008 and we're looking at increasing our staff numbers from 56 so it's not bad going," he said.
The Environmental Sustainability awarded to Matthews Coach Hire by the SFA was well deserved as Paddy is acutely aware of his firm's obligations, particularly in the area of fuel usage and CO2 emissions.
"We use about one million gallons of diesel a year. We teamed up with Sustainable Energy Ireland to find a solution and by installing GPS tracking devices we've reduced this by 18pc."
The company also recycles tyres and filters while the company harvests rainwater to wash its buses daily.
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Weather for Dundalk
Thursday 17 May 2012
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