Ms Anne Graham:

The services are either developed by the NTA or Bus Éireann, Iarnród Éireann and our Locallink operators' offices. We carry out two levels of review. One is where we take a county and look at all the services within it to see how we can improve them. We published a review carried out in Mayo, put it out for public consultation and received some feedback on it. We carry out high-level reviews but in order to provide additional services to the local communities, we continually get requests to provide additional services from our own different operators.

In such circumstances, we carry out a review of how each individual service fits into the wider network before giving approval. This is being done very much on a service by service basis, although we have also examined networks of services in our reviews. At local level, the reviews are carried out on a more integrated county by county basis.