Ms Anne Graham:

A number of years ago, we carried out a review of how rural transport was delivered and have now put in 17 local link offices which are on the ground working with local communities to try to develop rural transport services. We are getting down into all those individual services and locations where there is a need for further service improvements. It is a detailed service review, as in individual services, which is happening right across the State. As funding becomes available and as new services or changes to services are justified, we will work with the local link offices to put those in place. As I said, 13 have already gone in this year and we are looking at a further 40 this year alone. We would like to increase that across the State.

In terms of fares, we had to respond in the downturn because of reduced funding, both in terms of subsidy and fare revenue, to ensure that services would continue by increasing fares, even though there was a discount associated with the leap card on offer at the same time. Currently, our fare policy is to try to look at fare restructuring rather than, necessarily, fare increases. That is about rebalancing fares across the State. We found many anomalies among parts of the State in terms of services per km and we want to rebalance that so there is a fare structure for bus and rail services. That is the work we will be doing across the next few years. It will take a few years to put that structure in place.

In terms of increasing capacity, there are two elements. There is the infrastructure in terms of bus fleet and rail fleet but also there is subvention to support those services. Obviously we want to build that. We have capacity constraints building now and we want to introduce frequency and capacity on bus and rail services. However, it all requires additional funding. The tendering process is under way for both Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann services and because we are in the middle of procurement, I do not want to comment any further.