Mr. Richard Dolan:

As Mr. Stephen Kent has said, we accept that we have to work hard on the communications with Bus Éireann. That is something we can always improve. There is a challenge with any scheme involving 117,000 children. I am not quite sure how many families that translates into but the entire communication effort is compressed into a very tight timeframe. We have to try to run as effective and efficient a service as possible but that means that we have to ramp up our communications to a very high level for a very short period of time. We then have to let it calm down again. We cannot have a huge call centre on site all year round when we are only really dealing with a large volume of queries for four to five weeks of the year. I accept the Chairman's point on communications but am just trying to outline to the committee some of the challenges involved in running a national scheme.