Mr. Martin Nolan:

I will deal with the Deputy's questions in reverse. He asked about the systems that have led to 90% of services being tendered to private operators. From a health and safety perspective, we employ the UK Freight Transport Association to come across here every year. We give the association a list of all vehicles, including Bus Éireann vehicles. It chooses 7% of them at random to have their maintenance checked. If it is not happy with the maintenance, it checks the maintenance facilities of the relevant operator. We act on the reports that the association gives us. It depends on the standard of maintenance of the vehicles. We have been doing this check in between the annual DOE tests for the last seven or eight years.

From a public procurement and probity perspective, the CIE group's internal audit division conducts audits of all of Bus Éireann's systems under the guidance of the CIE board's audit committee. This division has complete autonomy to go anywhere in Bus Éireann group when it is auditing these systems. Our auditors, PricewaterhouseCoopers, come in on top of them to check the work of the internal audit people. PricewaterhouseCoopers would say that our systems have a strong level of internal control. The date on the latest good faith policy is 2013.

The code of ethics has been changed four times in recent years to include some new items. Last year the gift value was €120 but this has been reduced to €70. On the issue of discipline, I will pass on to our HR manager, Mr. Joe Kenny, to get the exact figure on it.