Mr. Gerry Murphy:

I believe it is appropriate to set out where we fit into the transport sector, an aspect the Comptroller and Auditor General has broadly covered. When the National Transport Authority was established in December 2009, we subsumed the functions of the Dublin Transportation Office. Later we took functions from the Railway Procurement Agency and the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport. After that, the Commission for Taxi Regulation was subsumed into our organisation. We are responsible for public transport, as well as cycling and walking.

We have contracts with the CIE companies and are responsible for the light rail service in Dublin. We have assigned that function to the Railway Procurement Agency. We have now started a tendering process for the replacement contract in 2014 for the operation of the light rail system in Dublin.

We also regulate and license public bus services which operate without subsidy from the State. There is a wide range of services. In the Dublin area people will be familiar with Swords Express and Aircoach, but throughout the country services are provided by private companies under licence.

We manage the rural transport programme on behalf of the Department. We took over this function in the middle of 2012. It includes all of the local services that emanated originally from the rural transport initiative which then became the rural transport programme. Some of these are demand responsive services in rural areas, where people make a telephone call and the local bus picks them up.

The Leap card was mentioned. It is at the heart of the integration of public transport services. Another successful project we have rolled out is the provision of real-time information for bus services. We have also launched a national journey planner for all public transport services, both public and private. It is the first time this has been made available. One can plan one's journey across all operators in the State.

At the start of 2011 we took over regulation of the taxi sector which includes taxis, hackneys and limousines. This has been a very busy year with regard to implementing the recommendations of the Government's taxi review report. Just this month we introduced a raft of new regulations and more will be introduced when the taxi Bill is enacted by the Oireachtas.

We have a statutory planning role. The objective is to integrate land use, transport provision and consolidation of land use to make transport provision more cost effective. We do this throughout the country and advise regional authorities on their regional planning guidelines.

We have a greater depth of functions within the Dublin area. The greater Dublin area includes the four Dublin local authorities, Kildare, Meath and Wicklow. It covers 40% of the population of the State and 40% of economic activity. One can understand public transport capital investment is particularly important for this metropolitan region. We deal with capital investment in the region, as well as regional traffic planning and securing greater integration between land use and transport planning. The authority manages the capital investment programme for public transport, cycling and walking and funds the transport operators and local authorities for approved projects. We also manage the capital investment programme for the regional cities of Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford on behalf of the Department, while we manage the national accessibility programme which deals with access to transport services for people with disabilities.

A substantial amount of money, approximately €500 million per annum, passes through our organisation. We have been strongly focused from the start on adequate and robust financial and audit controls. We have introduced a new financial management system which has streamlined our internal processes and made them more efficient by giving us greater capacity for analysis and reporting. We have introduced a web-based grants system for all the bodies we grant aid which facilitates their submission of grant claims, our monitoring of progress and the disbursement of money to them. In any one year we fund over 300 projects on the capital side.