Ms Anne Graham:

I will start with Deputy Fitzmaurice's questions. He is correct about bus shelter provision, we had to prioritise the areas that had the highest number of services and the highest demand in people being at the bus stop because of constraints in our funding. We would hope that we could put a bus shelter at every stop location but that will take some years. We had to put a priority system in place and given current funding we must focus on areas where demand is highest but we would like that to change very soon.

On our responsibilities, we have responsibility for the provision of rail services. We have a contract with Irish Rail for the rail passenger services. The Department has a contract with Irish Rail for the maintenance of the infrastructure and any extension or improvements to that is the responsibility of the Department of Transport, except where it is in the greater Dublin area where we have a role in funding the infrastructure improvements including rail. On the matter of improvements outside the greater Dublin area we are talking about improvement in frequency and the number of services on rail.