Ms Anne Graham:

Deputy O’Keeffe asked if there is a fixed budget set aside for services. There is no budget set aside specifically for disability services because the challenge is to make all the public transport services fully accessible. Our regional cities are very much there. Some aspects need to be improved such as next stop announcements and screens but overall the level of accessibility in the cities is quite high. The challenge is outside the cities and we have an issue with the fleet and bus stop infrastructure and information. There is a very low level of accessibility outside the city areas.

We receive a separate budget of €28 million for the next four years from the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport for the disability programme to improve and retrofit the infrastructure. That will go into the type of works I indicated earlier. I could not give a timeframe for getting all our services 100% accessible. It depends on the level of funding available, on some changes we hope to see in the fleet, and working together with our agencies and operators to deliver the infrastructure on the ground. There are definitely challenges in all that and I would not be able to give a timeframe.

Deputy Munster asked about the bus fleet. Before now all the services outside Dublin were operated by a coach fleet, which is a high floor coach. We have moved and changed our strategy so that the shorter journeys outside our cities will be operated by low floor vehicles, with a dedicated wheelchair space. That is a change in approach to the fleet. There would be no requirement for notice in respect of the fleet but we have to make sure there are accessible bus stops to serve that type of fleet. The challenge is the inter-city, the longer journey fleet which usually operates with a higher floor because that level of comfort is needed for the long distance journeys. We want to move away from the 24-hour notice. We would like to have no notice period associated with public transport services. We are moving incrementally by considering the short journeys initially, removing the requirement for notice on the basis that we have a low floor fleet available with the right bus stop infrastructure.

We are undertaking the audit of bus stops. We had done a lower level audit. Using much of the framework from the NTA we are assessing those in much more detail to see what level of accessibility we can give to the infrastructure we have. That will identify the work that needs to be done to have them considered 100% accessible, which feeds into the information we give on the journeys that can be made, through our journey planner. That work is under way and we expect to complete it in the next few months, which will also help our work programme on bus stops in particular.

The information that I gave on the private operators - the licensed commercial operators - refers to the services that are operated privately. That is the public transport services that are licensed by us, not tendered by us. When we go to tender services, and we do use commercial operators to provide services for us, we have moved and are moving towards requiring that the fleet they operate is wheelchair accessible, and preferably low-floor wheelchair accessible, particularly for the shorter journeys.

In terms of rural transport services, we allowed a short lead-in term of two years for those services. That means if the service is not wheelchair accessible, now that we have awarded them the contract, they have two years to get their fleet in place to offer wheelchair access. If they do not comply then we re-tender the service and remove the service from them. We are moving slowing to improve and move as much as possible towards a low-floor accessible fleet that does not require notice, and that does not require the removal of seats.