Ms Siobhan Barron:

I apologise for having missed a question earlier regarding the implications of EU regulations and the various directives. I want to highlight the fact that further obligations are coming down the track in terms of a web directive and also an EU accessibility act. The implications of those are that we will have to have better systems for planning, achieving and measuring the impact of what we are doing to realise those requirements progressively.

It is about how that is measured at national level but also how it is measured within the relevant sector. That comes in under a particular Department, for example, the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport, and it should be very much a strong feature of its strategic corporate plan and in how it measures and accounts for its performance as a Department and sector. How it feeds back in to reporting must also be considered, and how Ireland is performing and reporting back in to the EU systems.

We are always happy to support and guide on how this might happen. We will conduct our own independent assessment also. A lot more work, however, is needed to improve data, data sources, criteria that are used and the very specific timeframes and indicators that will apply. There are further obligations coming down the line that will impact the transport sector.