Ms Anne Graham:

I will work backwards if that is okay with the Deputy. Some of the information will have to be provided, as we do not have it available today. I will list what those are. On the disability side, we in the NTA procure the buses for Bus Éireann and Dublin Bus as part of a national programme. As part of that, those buses are lo floor and wheelchair accessible. There is one wheelchair space on those buses. Providing a second wheelchair space would remove a large amount of seating, which then impacts on other users who might have mobility issues, although they may not be wheelchair users. We have to balance it between the number of people that can be seated on a bus with some mobility issues and those who are in a wheelchair. For the services that we contract, we are driving the low-floor accessibility of those services through the purchase of fleet and a specification in the services that we contract as well. We have a very high level of accessibility in our Local Link services. Ms McElligott can give those figures.

In the services that we licence, there is currently not a requirement for them to be wheelchair accessible. We did carry out a public consultation just before Covid and we were just about to impose conditions associated with accessibility when the pandemic happened. It would not have been appropriate to put in place those kind of conditions on an industry that was suffering with reductions in revenues associated with the pandemic.

We are now looking at those license conditions again. We want to combine them with looking at setting out emission standards for those buses as well. We are currently working on that. I would imagine that we will be going out for consultation again this year on what could be license conditions for both emissions and also wheelchair accessibility for those licensed services.

In terms of moving our fleet, both the fleet that is owned by the NTA but also the fleet that is contracted by the NTA in rural Ireland be electric or zero emission, we commenced our work first of all in urban areas. We have an obligation to ensure that fleet is not diesel. We initially purchased hybrid buses to test them out, which would have an approximate 30% reduction in carbon emissions, and we now have a fully electric fleet on which we commenced our first pilot service. Our first fully electric service commenced in Athlone and is operated by Bus Éireann.

While we have identified a solution for our urban fleet, which can operate all day and be charged overnight, we have not yet identified what will be the solution to drive the zero-emission target in the longer distance fleet in our rural and regional services. We are piloting this, however. We purchased three hydrogen fuel buses for operation by Bus Éireann, which operates on them on the 105 service that serves Ratoath and Ashbourne, to test them out and see what issues are associated with using hydrogen fuel and whether hydrogen will be available to support further buses. They are obviously more expensive buses so we have to start with a pilot initially and see whether we can extend that further out.

This year, we will commence to see what the market has available in terms of a longer distance zero-emission fleet that could operate for much longer periods and over longer distances in order that we can move the fleet that is operated by us or that is provided directly by us for our contracted services, whether those are provided by Bus Éireann or some of our Local Link operators. We know we have to drive that, but we just need the technology to be a little bit more advance to enable us to operate a battery electric fleet that can operate for much longer periods over longer distances in rural Ireland.

We have a pilot service in Dingle, which has had some trials in terms of getting it up. There were certainly learnings for us in trying to get one of our services to be fully electric in Dingle. We hope to launch that later this year. That has also given us many learnings in how to deliver electric charging points for a bus system in rural Ireland. There is plenty more to do on our side, however.

I have the numbers on the hackney side, which I will give to the Deputy now. We have approximately 27 local area hackneys, two of which are grant aided. We launched a pilot scheme in one local area in which a €6,000 grant is available for one year for those local area hackney pilots. As the Deputy said, however, they have to operate at certain hours as part of the grant conditions. We received 41 applications in respect of 15 of the areas we identified. We had identified 21 areas but received no applications whatsoever from six areas. We made 15 provisional grant offers. Of the 15 that have been issued, one candidate has completed the licensing process and five of the other candidates have progressed to the second stage, which means they have commenced the licensing process. I have the areas, which I can send to the Deputy separately. This is a pilot scheme to try to identify the issues that are preventing the local area hackney being a success in local areas. We will monitor what happens across the year and see whether there is anything else that needs to be done to try to deliver a lot more hackney services in rural Ireland.

Mr. Gaston might wish to talk about the fares.