Mr. Aidan Murphy:

Regarding the free transport scheme, the difficulty is that the funding that came from the Department did not cover the number of passengers carried on Expressway in particular. There have been extensive discussions recently in this regard, and the budgets are being clarified. The clarification arising from these discussions of the budget amount that will come to Bus Éireann for free travel in 2018 will, I hope, be a significant improvement on the previous situation.

I am not quite clear on the point the Senator made about Expressway. Our Expressway service is purely commercial and no subvention from the State is involved either in day-to-day running or capital investment. With significant competition on all the routes we service, we must try to manage that competition as best we can while continuing to service the intermediate towns as best as possible. There is a dilemma there because passengers at the end of the line want almost a non-stop service. If someone gets on at Galway, for example, he or she will want a non-stop service to Dublin and will get frustrated if it calls at Athlone or Mullingar on the way. However, the reality is that we must service customers in those towns as well, so there is an issue there that is very difficult to manage.

Coming back to the Senator's third point about the NTA, we have worked very closely with the NTA where new licences have been granted to us for the bypassing of certain towns because of the number of passengers using the service. The NTA then infills with Local Link and so on in order that there is a match-up between bringing passengers locally to a point at which we can then pick them up on our Expressway service. A little more work probably needs to be done on this, and the NTA itself would recognise that, but I think it has substantially improved. Certainly, on any occasion where we are bypassing a town, we have substantial negotiation and discussion with the NTA on the matter. In general, we have forged a good relationship with the NTA in dealing with all the issues around ensuring seamless transport for Ireland. Its brief is to provide that interlinked transport using different service providers. This is the point I was making in my address. In the past, Bus Éireann was charged with responsibility for providing public transport as a mission. That is now the remit of the National Transport Authority. We are now a service provider and we will work to provide that level of best-quality service in conjunction with the plans that the NTA has to serve the country as a whole.