Mr. Alan Kerry:

I think the Senator raised a valid point, but to provide any solution, we have to be competently aware of what the problem is. One of the issues that we do not have at the moment and we have not experienced in recent years, thankfully, is funding. We can say that funding is there and is available to us. However, I am starting to recognise in my role that resource does not equal capacity. You may have the resource for positions or to do a particular job, but do you have the skill sets? From a sustainable mobility perspective and when I look around the room, with the exception of one or two who are of a similar vintage, we know that 15 years ago the average bus that ran around rural Ireland was a school bus. That operated in a very different manner from how we would progress to operate public transport services. When we look at and consider local authorities, up to now, there were people - and I mean no disrespect to engineers - who were responsible for widening roads and making them more available to private car usage and all the rest of it. They are now the people who we associate with the responsibility for road space reallocation. Road space reallocation is a critical part of any discussion that we have on to how we are going to progress public transport in rural areas. It is very hard to differentiate between the urban town and the rural area. We have services that are running very competently and meeting their schedules. There are no issues on that side until they get to the outskirts of the town. Then they have to argue for that same piece of tarmac as a single car driver on that road. My point is that as we sit in this environment, we all need to consider resourcing and capacity. While we may have the resources, do we have the capacity? That is a piece of work that needs to be done. We must look at skill sets, and ensure that we create a mindset in relation to what sustainable mobility is, because that is now how we have travelled in this country up to now. We are going to have to bring people with us, and we are going to have to be able to show areas of success. We are going to have to be able to identify pilot areas where we can say that it works and can set out what we want to do next. From a Local Link perspective, we can be very proud of the fact that any services that we have put in place under the Connecting Ireland Rural Mobility Plan have been successful. There are local authority areas that see them and say they want one of them. That has to be deemed as a success. We have to get better at identifying our own successes and what is working, but we also have to be brave and honest enough to speak about what is missing so that we can really bring that top-end service that is required.