Mr. Myles O'Reilly:

I will make one or two points in response to Mr. Macken. He favours the retention of local area hackneys. After five years, there are only 13 of those nationally. That approach has not worked and needs to be replaced. What we propose would not require new legislation. It would require new regulation by the National Transport Authority, which was empowered to bring in new regulations to deal with this matter. An important point has been made about the lack of Wi-Fi and mobile phone connections in rural areas. To be practical, sharing of vehicles will be required in rural areas if we are to provide any kind of reasonable service.