Mr. Aidan Murphy:

I am pleased to confirm that the Labour Court recommendation is being implemented. Based on a meeting yesterday at the WRC, all the revised rosters will be finalised by next Monday so that is good news. There are over 60 work practice change recommendations involved in the process and they are all being worked on actively and as quickly as possible. There has been very good engagement between management and employee representatives in implementing that change so I am pleased to report that to the Deputy.

I take the point made by the Deputy regarding Expressway routes. It was one of the issues that caused great difficulty for the commerciality of Expressway in that we were committed to providing passage for people on free travel despite the fact that our competitors do not do that, and we will continue to do that.

However, we were not getting the funding from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection to compensate for that. Based on discussions this year, we have made substantial progress in improving that position. The figures will be confirmed in coming weeks. There will be a substantial improvement which we believe will go a considerable way towards helping us to make Expressway a much more competitive and sustainable operation. We are committed to ensuring the Expressway routes provide connectivity into the major provincial towns. Some passengers want to get on a bus in Cork and go all the way to Dublin without stopping in between, but the provincial towns such as Clare and Thurles along the way also need to be serviced. We are committed to providing those services in the best way possible. It is dependent on the patronage of passengers in those towns. In some of the areas where we have indicated the routes are under threat, sometimes there is demand to improve the number of passengers using the service but sometimes there is not and in those environments we must take the decision to discontinue a service in order to make Expressway competitive.

On school buses, we operate purely as a service provider. The Department has its policy guidelines on the number of students we pick up, the routes, the number servicing particular schools and so on. There is good communication, where we feed information from our guys on the ground through to the Department on which it can base its decisions. I do not have the level of detail to comment on individual areas but I take the general point that the Deputy is making and will convey it to the chief executive so that we are communicating as fully as possible with the Department on any local issues that might arise. It is important to preserve the sense of identity in a county or region because that kind of thing has an impact on people in those areas.