Mr. Hugh Creegan:

The areas for local area hackneys are defined. We genuinely want the hackneys to be for the local area. In granting the licence, there will be an area of pick-up operation, with a radius of X number of kilometres, agreed and defined.

With regard to growing the number of pilot programmes, we will act as soon as we get some feedback. We are not in the business of waiting for ages to know how a pilot functions. We will know very quickly whether we have issues to resolve. If we do not, we see ourselves moving to rolling this out across the State in a planned way in a very short period, subject to funding being available.