Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
A CLAIM THAT Dublin Bus hired 100 people from Africa to fulfil Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies is false.
Dublin Bus did hire nearly 100 drivers from South Africa, but not as part of an equality drive. They hired qualified, professional drivers from a country that drives on the left to tackle a driver shortage.
One video spreading the false claim has received hundreds of likes since being posted to Instagram on 11 August.
“On Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies, Dublin Bus hire 100 Africans”, a man says to camera, as a newspaper headline appears onscreen.
“I applied for them. I have high IQ,” the man continues. “I should have got the job. But I didn’t, because I’m Irish and because I’m white.”
The man in the video doesn’t mention if he has any experience as a professional driver, though in a previous video, he tells a story about driving over the speed limit and complains that speed limits and speed vans were disgusting.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — often shortened to DEI — is a term that refers to policies that promote fair treatment and participation, particularly among marginalised groups, in workplaces, education and in wider public discourse.
Such policies have become a major political target in the US during the second presidency of Donald Trump, who denounces them as racial discrimination.
Bike lanes, science and even photos of World War II bombers have been caught up in this campaign.
The US transportation secretary announced he was cutting funding for “DEI bike lanes“.
Photos of the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima were taken down from government websites because the name of the plane, Enola Gay, contained a DEI keyword that triggered its removal.
And long lists of keywords associated with DEI (e.g. accessibility) were drawn up by government departments, and science projects that included such terms in their proposals were defunded. In a lawsuit, federal agencies said they did so because those projects “expressed, or were presumed to express, viewpoints disfavoured by the Administration”.
Like other American culture war topics, such as Critical Race Theory, the term has been widely criticised by right-leaning commentators on social media, eventually making its way into Irish fringe discourse.
There has been no mention of DEI in the media coverage of the Dublin Bus drivers story, including the headline that appeared onscreen in the Instagram video that claimed 100 drivers had been hired from Africa for DEI reasons.
That screenshot was taken from a 10 August Irish Times story, titled: “Dublin Bus has hired almost 100 drivers from South Africa”.
The terms “diversity”, “equity”, and “inclusion” were not mentioned in the article, which instead reported that the drivers were hired because Dublin Bus wanted to “fill vacant roles caused by staff turnover and expanding services”.
Dublin Bus does have a Diversity & Inclusion policy, though this does not include any references to overseas recruitment.
Instead, it says it uses “procedures to ensure there is no discrimination in our recruitment and promotion processes”.
In an email to The Journal, Dublin Bus confirmed that the drivers from South Africa were not hired due to their equality goals.
“These are qualified, professional D licence bus drivers who drive on the same side of the road as we do in Ireland,” their response read.
“They are recruited overseas and go through the same competency assessments as all of our bus drivers. Once they join Dublin Bus they also receive professional driver training in our Training Centre.”
Dublin Bus said that they had looked for new ways to recruit due to driver shortages in Ireland and the EU.
“Dublin Bus has seen exceptional growth in recent years,” their email read. It noted that they had hired about 1,000 drivers since 2024 due to “the implementation of BusConnects and the expansion of services, combined with the growth in customer numbers”.
Dublin Bus also rejected claims that it would not hire someone for being white or Irish, as the video claimed, saying they were an Equal Opportunities Employer, meaning they do not discriminate on grounds such as race.
The European Commission has warned that the EU is grappling with “a severe and escalating shortage of professional commercial truck and bus drivers driven by the ageing of existing drivers and the lack of sufficient young ones”.
Other reasons a potential bus driver might be rejected include being fluent in English, being unavailable to do shift work, not having a correct driving licence, or for having serious motoring bans or convictions.
It has promoted initiatives to recruit drivers from outside the EU to fill this demand.
The Journal’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site