Ms Anne Graham:

I will start off by talking about rural transport services. Our ambition is to have much better connectivity throughout rural Ireland. We are bringing forward a programme called Connecting Ireland which is about looking and making sure there are connections between towns and villages in rural Ireland to their main centres. We will be bringing that forward for consultation later on this year. It would include Deputy Canney's area in terms of County Galway.

When Deputy Canney said proposals were brought forward and were not considered viable, it was possible we did not have the funding available for those kinds of services. We have ambitions to put in a much higher level of service throughout rural Ireland. It will require funding. We will be putting together a case for the delivery of a Connecting Ireland infrastructure, which is about a much better connected network of services throughout rural Ireland. That will be part of a public consultation later this year. We will be available to give more information in terms of what those plans are.

When we say connected, we want all those services to be fully accessible as well, both in terms of fleet and the level of service appropriate for living in rural Ireland. The ambition of living in parts of rural Ireland without a private car and still being able to access services is the ambition we have in terms of Connecting Ireland.

There are some services at the moment. We are going through a period in the pandemic in which commercial operators providing the services on a commercial basis have struggled and can only be providing service currently with the support of the State and Government funding. The National Transport Authority has been given funding in order to be able to support those services, but we want to ensure that funding is used in the most effective way and on services which have the highest level of demand.

Some services across the State which are being provided by commercial services have not had high levels of demand. We hope that demand will come back. We expect it to come back, as the restrictions are eased. We keep under review the services which were reduced in the last few weeks in order to ensure we have a network of services available as restrictions are eased and are available for people to travel around the country. Those Galway to Limerick services will be under review between the NTA and Bus Éireann, but we felt it was appropriate to reduce a number of services with the operators in order to ensure we had funding available for a longer period of time for those commercial operators.

We want all of our taxi fleet to be wheelchair accessible. There is a funding element to that. I have not got the exact figure of what we would require if we were to grant aid at the same level as this year. There is also ambition for that fleet to transfer to being electric or low emission. Unfortunately, the availability of a fleet which is both fully electric and wheelchair accessible is quite limited and that limits the choice available for the taxi sector. We would expect that to improve as the technology improves and as more manufacturers get into the electric vehicle space. We will probably give Deputy Canney more detail about that in a written response.