Eating on the go isn’t uncommon, and certainly isn’t a crime, but that didn’t stop one Dublin bus driver from threatening to call authorities on a hungry passenger. According to The Sun, the woman boarded the bus with three McDonald’s chicken nuggets in tow and was told she couldn’t ride and eat.
Ronke Esther told Dublin Live the driver stopped the bus and ordered her to take her nuggets and get off the bus Tuesday night. The confrontation left her feeling “picked on and insulted,” she said, noting that other passengers on the bus had been drinking coffee. She recalled attempting to gobble up the McDonald’s quickly, so the bus could resume its route, but the driver told her it was a no-go.
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“[The driver] said, ‘You can’t do that’ so I said OK and put the two in my bag — but then he said I couldn’t do that either, saying it’s to do with hygiene,” Esther said in her interview with Dublin Live. “He told me to get off the bus. I just shoved [the nuggets] in my bag and went upstairs, but he stopped the engine and followed me.”
Per The Sun‘s reporting, food and drink are not permitted on Dublin buses. The altercation lasted 15 minutes, according to the outlet. The driver threatened to call authorities because Esther “disobeyed his orders in the first place,” but passengers came to her defense. Others on the bus reportedly told the driver they frequently brought and ate food on the bus with no issue, and he backed down.
“I was surprised to get the support I got from other passengers — nobody said a bad word to me as they believed they would do the same if that happened to them and I was fighting for respect for my skin type and my rights,” Ester told Dublin Live.
Dublin Bus confirmed that it received a complaint about the incident. The company said it was investigating what transpired on the bus that night before taking action.
“We can confirm we received a complaint from a customer regarding this incident,” Dublin bus said in a statement, according to The Sun. “We take incidents of this nature extremely seriously and are investigating the matter.”
Esther feels the incident had to do with the fact that she’s Black, according to Metro UK. She noted that the driver didn’t hassle another passenger with a coffee in her hand. Esther told the outlet the women had “the opposite skin color to mine.”
It appears nothing has been done about the incident thus far. The bus driver’s motivations remain unknown.
