Mr. Philip O'Callaghan:

Going back to touch on the point of infrastructure, we have the challenge of the cost of the green vehicles. It is also very important that the infrastructure to be installed in the future would include charging points, toilets for customers and toilet drops for coaches. This is stuff we see when we travel. We observe these things across Europe and these facilities are there. If they are put into the small rural towns, it will encourage coach tourism in and will encourage tourists in that direction because the facilities are there for the coaches when they arrive. If they have the toilets and the toilet drops for the buses, the operators will be pushing for those destinations. The charging points will also be very important into the future.

Accessibility is also an issue. When we have people with special needs or impaired mobility, it is important that we can off-load and load them in a safe place and that we are not pulling in at the side of streets where we are rushing and so on. These are very important points to encourage coaches and vehicles into rural Ireland.

I will go back to the issue of apprenticeships and so on.

We have had some really good engagement with and support from the education and training boards, ETBs, which we welcome and appreciate very much. However, we have the unique issue where we cannot apply for a licence for an individual until he or she is 21 years of age and then it takes anything from six months to a year before he or she becomes qualified so we lose those younger people coming into the industry. They are generally gone. When we start training we train older people because by the time people reach 21, they will have gone in other directions in life and come back to us after. It would be great if we could catch people when they are young and get them trained up when they are 18, like the HGV owners can. Even if they go away for a while they will have their licence always and they will come back to us. Even if we are lucky enough to attract 21-year-olds to our industry, when it comes to some public service contracts, and other things we are dealing with, we cannot put 21-year-olds on those contracts as people must be 25 or older. Again, such age stipulations can be very restrictive and we are losing the people that we could get. It would be very helpful to us if these aspects could be examined by the committee. Our industry was decimated during Covid. We lost a lot of older drivers through health concerns or they enjoyed the two years off and decided not to come back to work. We lost drivers to other sectors where they started to drive HGVs or delivery vans for supermarkets or whatever and those drivers have not come back to us. We, therefore, have a lot of challenges and could do with a lot more supports than we have.