The Department of Transport will review the safety criteria for the location of bus stops all around the State, the Minister for Transport has told the Dáil.
Mr Brennan also agreed to consider the safety hazards posed to pedestrians by the introduction of the Luas light rail and he said that the report of the inquiry into the weekend's fatal bus crash would be published "as soon as it is completed".
He had asked the Department of Transport to review the safety criteria for the location of bus stops and "whether it is still satisfied with the criteria used to choose those locations".
During a special debate on the Wellington Quay crash, in which five people died, the Minister said the Garda had conducted preliminary interviews with the drivers of both buses and that "full interviews will take place as soon as possible. Until such time as those interviews are concluded it is not expected that we will get a clearer view of what precisely happened."
Mr Brennan spoke earlier yesterday to the Garda Commissioner and the Minister said the Commissioner had assigned a "substantial number of personnel" to the case and many witnesses had come forward.
"He indicated to me that one witness had confirmed that the driver was in the seat of the bus that went forward. The Garda regard that as a very useful piece of confirmation."
Mr Brennan said: "I have not seen anything like the unique situation detailed in the diagrams. The great unanswered question is why that second bus apparently found itself moving along the inside of a parked bus, with people on the left, and in the course of that, causing such awful trauma and tragedy."
He pointed out that the driver principally involved had 20 years' experience and that he had clear blood and urine samples, and had been fully rested before going on duty.
Asked by Mr Denis Naughten, Fine Gael's transport spokesman, about the criteria for choosing bus stops, Mr Brennan said that "it is not helpful to anybody at this stage to try to draw conclusions as to the safety or otherwise of the stop".
He pointed out that complaints about the stop "referred mostly to the night-time environment, public lighting, noise and pedestrian access, rather than its precise architecture".
The procedure for choosing stops had been in place since 1961, and the Garda determines the location of a stop in consultation with the bus company and the local authority.
The normal procedure, including safety, was fully gone through for this bus stop. "There are many similar locations around the country, all of which have come through the same procedure."
Labour's transport spokeswoman, Ms Roisin Shortall, called for a safety audit to be carried out on all bus stops and particularly at terminus stops in the Dublin city area, including those moved on a temporary basis.
The Minister said that "all over the country there are situations which could be improved, such as narrow streets with heavy traffic, including buses and trucks with big wing mirrors sticking out at the sides".
He would ask "all the agencies to review the locations and to satisfy themselves that the original decision to sign off on those locations still holds from a safety point of view".
Mr Brennan said he did "not want to alarm people" and was doing this "in a spirit of common sense so that those agencies can reassure themselves that their original decisions were good rather than doing so from the perspective of a major investigation".
