Mr. Gerry Murphy:

What I was trying to say is public transport services at any point in time must be provided. We are contracted with the operators. The operators are reducing their costs year on year and when we look at their fares increases, it is in the context of whether we want to maintain services, the drop in subsidy, the drop in patronage revenues and their cost control. For example, Iarnród Éireann has reduced staff numbers from 6,000 to 4,000 in the past eight years. Bus Éireann has driven down its costs, and Dublin Bus has driven down its costs. We are seeing cost reduction plans in the organisations. We are seeing growing efficiencies. In the Dublin area, where Dublin Bus is the biggest carrier of public transport in the State, we have seen a fundamental reorganisation of its services and its network direct. It is much more efficient. We have reorganised the services for Bus Éireann in the regional cities. In Galway, we are seeing a 20% increase in revenue from that and we are now reviewing all the services in rural areas throughout the State. There are efficiency measures in place. When we get the fares increases and look at the diminishing subsidies, we must also take account of whether we want to keep the network of public transport services operational in the State.

We have separately reported to the Minister on the bus market and it is no secret that we have recommended to the Minister that there should be an opening of the bus market in 2014. It is a matter for the Government to consider that item and it has to come back to us. We have met with the Government's economic committee and we have been told to wait until we get a response. We have identified that savings could be made by some graded opening of the market. We believe that could work well. It could also work well for the existing State operators because they will see benchmarking of a private operator doing a similar business.

We are conscious of all these matters but I come back to the fundamental point that the organisations are not grossly inefficient. Deloitte was commissioned by the Department of Transport in 2007. It did a review of the operations of Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann and said that in general they were comparable with international standards. That is not to say that we cannot achieve cost savings. They are not grossly inefficient, therefore, and there are opportunities for efficiencies but they are under-subsidised. They also have the perfect storm as the subsidy is dropping, passenger numbers have been dropping across all operators and because they are reliant on the revenue as well as on the passenger numbers they have been hit by that double whammy and the triple whammy of fuel duty rebate being gone. All those factors have come about to create the cash flow problems for the CIE Group, the need for €36 million to come in and our fares increases but we have reserved our position. We have said we will only consider a fares increase annually on the basis of projections of cost savings, revenues, the services they will provide and the quality of what they have delivered in the past year.