Mr. Stephen Kent:

I will pass some of those questions to my colleague, Mr. Parker, for comment. I again unreservedly apologise to anybody who was impacted. We do not like to drop any service. As I stated, I am delighted we are doing much better. We did engage. It took longer than we would have liked to get resources in place. The first challenge in that regard was the recruitment of mechanics. We deployed people from other regions, such as Donegal. We had to get resources in place and get people familiarised with the vehicles. All of that takes time. Having come out of that, we are still relying on external help in that regard. When we went to the market, some of the external contractors were facing the same issues. It was not from lack of endeavour. Everything we could do was being done but we could not do it quickly enough. I accept that. There were two weeks during which the issues were pronounced, as the Deputy stated.

I referred to the fact we are carrying 160,000 journeys a week across all those services. In the Deputy’s home town of Navan, the NX is an enormously successful route. When we introduced that 20-minute frequency coming out of the city a couple of years ago, it was very slow to build, but we could be filling three double-deckers in the mornings now. There is significant demand on the route. That is a great tribute to the success of the route but it also means that if a bus is dropped, 80 people could be left behind. The Deputy is not wrong. Hundreds of people were impacted in that instance where buses were dropped and the service was intermittent. That is where one sees the scale of the problem. We were able to correct it. In terms of what we delivered against the scheduled timetable on the NX route, for example, it was 97% still delivered. Mr. Parker can correct me if I am wrong on that. If we miss out on providing just one of those trips, however, that will impact those people and discommode them. It is a challenge in terms of success.

I am sorry we could not get people to their destination. We did everything we could and we were trying to do it faster. Those passengers need to go about their jobs and lives and the whole lot. As we stated in our company purpose, we are here to connect people to what matters for them to make life better. That is what we are saying. In that instance, in terms of-----