Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the NTA's representatives. As they know, I am concerned about a whole lot of rural issues. I have sent some emails and I hope I will get an answer to them soon. I will focus on the issues for discussion today. I will start with the first point. As I have pointed out time and again, when it comes to vehicle subsidies rural Ireland is totally discriminated against, counting per head of population.

The amount of money spent on urban and public buses and vehicles is much higher than in rural areas. I am not begrudging of that and it is very handy when one is in the city. One can get buses, trains and there are all sorts of ways of getting around. It is about levelling up the playing pitch, and it is up it must come. Nothing should be taken from the cities but we need to spend money. Why should everything in rural Ireland be done for free? I do not agree with the notion of it being a free or voluntary community effort. As with everyone else who provides a service, the providers should be able to earn a living from it. If we looked at the addresses of hackney and taxi owners around the country, we might be quite surprised at how many of them are in rural areas with no service. The reason is they tend to migrate to the cities on busy nights. This is not just a problem in isolated rural areas with no service. This is a problem of people not being sure on any given night or day that the service will be available when they want it. Currently, the hackney operators are free to go wherever they get fares.

We need a comprehensive solution of contracted services to ensure every part of island has contracted services available by public service vehicle at all reasonable hours. It is not a big ask where a population is not sparse. I look at this proposal and there is one service in County Galway, so thanks for that.