Mr. Brian Lynch:

The Deputy has asked a couple of questions, one of which I will divert back to Mr. Crowley. It is about pricing between Bus Éireann and private operators on shared routes.

We did not compete with Bus Éireann on routes in County Waterford. We have an established network of town services that run from Waterford to villages such as Dunmore East and Portlaw. Trading has been extremely difficult. We are about to shut our company. We will withdraw services from the end of October 2022. It was necessary for various reasons, including that we essentially did not recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. Rural operators have had a different experience as regards passenger footfall. We are roughly at 50% of where we were in 2019. I am aware that in Dublin and on Expressway routes footfall has come back up. We were glad to get the commercial bus operator, CBO, scheme that assisted us to keep going up to the end of June, but we realised when that ended our business was in real trouble. That has been coupled with increased fuel costs, as is common knowledge. The Deputy is asking about the NTA. I agree that we have always had a professional relationship with it. We are a third generation family company started in 1899 by my great-uncle. We know the business. We have always been a good employer. We have been professional and over many years we have had ups and downs with the NTA.

We have always tried to maintain a fully professional relationship with the authority. It has not been easy at times. Part of our conversation coming to the end of June was that we knew we were in real trouble and were not going to be able to continue our services, which caused me a lot of concern because we are tight in our local community. We are a small company with ten buses and 15 employees. We know all of our customers. I was concerned that we were going to be in a situation where we were not going to be able to continue our services. I found it hard to get that across the line and get that communication to come back. At the moment we have just about got to a position where the NTA are stepping in to provide bus services from 1 November.