Mr. John Fitzgerald:

No. As part of this price review, there is an attempt to simplify the fares. Some fares are antiquated and do not make any sense anymore. Overall, the intention is there will be a review and my expectation is that it will recommend an increase. I have not seen anything to suggest otherwise.

The 10% of bus services put out to contract is not privatisation. I would not be happy with any suggestion that it should be privatised. It is an attempt to produce price comparators and see what the private sector can do with prices and competitiveness. The CIE companies can compete and may well win the competition. I expect they will compete and will be in with the same chance as every other operator. It is not privatisation. The staff’s concerns include the two-pay rights of transfer if the CIE companies do not win it. The objective is to pick routes that will provide us with an opportunity to assess the performance of CIE against the performance of private operators. The National Transport Authority, NTA, believes this should be done as there is a legal imperative on us to do it anyway. Unless we can assure the Government there is no private sector option available, then we are obliged to examine that.

There are discussions going on with the unions on this and will be held again in January. I hope we can go a long way towards meeting their concerns. I accept there are concerns that the whole of Waterford city’s operations are involved. However, one cannot divide Waterford into several sections. We were anxious to pick one provincial city where it could be tested. That is all we are doing - testing. The other routes are designed to be large enough to produce a measure but not large enough to banjax any other part of the system.

I wish we could have avoided any public transport fare increases. The authority’s objective is to encourage people to use public transport, especially people who cannot afford private cars. While I would love to say we could avoid a fare increase, it is not possible when the subvention from the Exchequer to the company is down by 30% and usage over the past several years is down by 17%. I accept, however, it is growing and is back up now by about 3%.

We are a regulator. We have not been put under pressure by anybody to do anything. We are an independent body and we have volumes of correspondence from companies and various interest groups on what should and should not be done. All I can say is that we are not happy, and the public is not happy, with the increases. I do not believe any of the companies are happy with the increases they got. It is a bit of a juggling act in terms of trying to weigh up what is needed by them against what we believe should be imposed on the public. The reality is that in view of the loss of subvention, the loss of passenger numbers and the increases in the costs of fuel, which have been a huge factor in recent years, although they are dropping again now but they buy their fuel forward, if we, as the regulator, did not concede increases we would not have a public transport system. In the interests of the people who cannot afford the alternative, it is hugely important that we-----