Mr. Hugh Creegan:

The BusConnects core bus corridor project will require compulsory purchase. When more than one, two or three people are involved, we cannot do land acquisition by agreement and have to use the compulsory purchase order process. Our intention is to deal with people fairly and properly during the procedure. We started to meet people. For the first four corridors, 343 people were potentially affected. We wrote to each of them in advance and invited them to contact us for a one-to-one meeting. We have had about 40 meetings so far with people. We are waiting for the remainder to contact us and we will meet them.

Noise abatement is something we will get into at the next stage of design. We are really at the first step of concept design. Later we have to do what used to be called an environmental impact statement, EIS. It is now called an environmental impact assessment report. In that, we will have to assess the noise impacts and the air quality impacts on all property. If mitigation measures, of whatever type, are needed, we will do them. It is far too early at this stage to say where we are affecting people to the point where we need to implement those measures.

The local routes in Blanchardstown was a theme that came up. We got a lot of feedback from the consultation on the bus services. It is taking us a lot of time to go through them. A bag of 30,000 submissions is not a small one to go through. We are working our way through it. We will be redesigning the network to try to address most of the issues. We will not be able to address them all but we are absolutely confident we can address many of them and still keep a better bus system. Our only objective in doing it was to try to get a better bus system overall for people. It will be a number of months before we finish the process and have something to go back out to consultation with and get people's feedback. At that stage, we will not have solved everybody's problem but we would be disappointed if we had not solved a lot of them.