Mr. David Conway:

I will refer to Mr. Lynch in a moment specifically about services that have to be withdrawn. He can speak about that from personal experience.

There are many different facets to this, but as regards fares, two Government schemes were launched earlier this year by the Department of Transport and the NTA became the administrator of the schemes. Perhaps not all of the blame lies with the NTA, but I cannot say for sure. One of those schemes is a 20% cost-of-living measure that was introduced back in April when 20% was taken off the price of public transport. That immediately applied to all State operators but commercial operators have been excluded from that scheme to date. As a result, in more rural areas where a commercial operator is probably the only provider of a bus service in that area, the customers of that service are not benefiting from a cost-of-living measure because they are not getting the 20% fare reduction. However, people who live in Dublin benefit from that 20% reduction because it is available on State services, such as Dublin Bus, Luas, DART and Irish Rail.