Ms Anne Graham:

I might respond first by speaking on rural Ireland. As the Deputy may know, we are working on Connecting Ireland, which is about improving the connections between our towns and rural parts of Ireland. We will be going out for public consultation on an improved network of services later on this year.

Services are currently operated by the Local Link offices on our behalf. There is a combination of fixed schedule services as well as demand responsive services. These were primarily set up to provide services to isolated rural areas where the demand is lowest. It ensures that there is a connection at certain times of the day. It can be a door-to-door service to bring older vulnerable users into their local towns. It is a model we have in operation with our Local Link services.

I imagine the model the Deputy is thinking of is more urban-based. There may not be demand for a scheduled service in an urban area and I think he is talking about the potential of looking at a demand responsive service mixed with a scheduled service. That is something we would like to pilot if we were in a position to do so. It would probably start in Dublin, where there are potential gaps, although we do not see many gaps in our proposed BusConnects network. There is the possibility that areas could be better served by a demand responsive service. It requires subsidisation. It is simply that we have not been in a position to pilot this in the past two years given where we are with funding. However, it is definitely something we would like to pilot in future.