Ms Anne Graham:

The Senator is right that journey times are an important part of the review of transport services in a county. What we are trying to do is ensure the journey times from people's towns and villages are around 30 minutes from their next largest metropolitan centre and then an hour and a half away from a regional centre. That is the kind of timeframe in which we think it is reasonable for people to make a journey to there and back and that is what is going into Connecting Ireland. That means changing the services to possibly being more regular services on key routes and then feeding in demand-responsive services, whether it is every day or a number of days per week. That is the kind of design we are looking at at the moment.

We will certainly be engaged on the Kilrush to Ennis route and be looking at that as part of Connecting Ireland for County Clare. We must realise that there will be a proportion of people living in very isolated rural areas who obviously will not get a bus to their door but we have to balance it. If we can provide a demand-responsive service, particularly for those who have no access to transport, that should be part of the delivery of services. It is not going to be that we will have a regular service to some parts of very rural Ireland but they should be close enough that they can get to a regular service that will bring them to their local centre with reasonable regularity during the week.