Ms Anne Graham:

One of the roles of the transport co-ordination units will be to identify where those connections between Bus Éireann and rural transport could be better made and what infrastructure is required to support those connections so we get those links between the rural transport services and the main scheduled services. The value for money report targeted an administrative cost of 13% of the costs to be achieved next year. When examining a service provision overhead, we hope the TCUs will be able to grow services, take on other transport services possibly currently provided by the HSE, so that overhead is being shared across a much greater service delivery. Then one does not have the same concern about the level of administrative costs. We would approach it both ways: reducing costs and growing the service provision so those administration costs are shared over a greater number of services.

School transport is one of the key areas the national integrated rural transport committee is examining. It has difficulties in that the programme for school transport provision managed by Bus Éireann is very structured. We can look to see whether rural transport can provide a service at a different time to broaden the number of passengers it can serve. Where there is school transport provision in a certain area we are also looking to pilot a scheme to examine the return legs of those services, particularly where the bus goes to a school in a rural area and returns to a town, to see whether we can gain efficiencies associated with that. We would have to do it separately from the school transport procurement. If that is successful we would examine rolling it out in other locations.

There are already some cross-Border rural transport initiatives, for example in Donegal. We would try to retain as many of the cross-Border initiatives that are there as possible and grow them with our colleagues across the Border.