Mr. Dermot O'Leary:

I will not eat into Deputy Murphy's time too much, but I thank Deputy Duncan Smith for his kind remarks. To clarify, the NBRU's call for face coverings was mainly done to restore confidence in public transport. Deputy Murphy's question feeds into that. The infection rate is, thankfully, in single digits across bus and rail services. That is my understanding anyway, but I am sure someone else will say it is different.

As the Deputy knows, we covered capacity issues comprehensively in our submission. We are guided by public health advice by and large. I spoke to the Deputy some time ago. There are capacity issues across the greater Dublin area and large urban areas. We cannot go back to crush capacities. They are called "crush loadings" in the industry, where people are squeezed sardine-line onto trains and buses. There needs to be a debate about how we will manage people returning to public transport. There were 290 million passenger journeys in 2019. The infection rate is in the single digits, but we need to have a broader conversation about how we will manage public transport. That is the bus and train experience.