Mr. Peter Strachan:

I have seen that elsewhere. I mean where you have a big dominant capital city and people outside the capital believe they are not getting a fair slice of the action. It is for that reason we held our October board meeting in Limerick. I had never been to Limerick before and I made it my business to arrive a day early to see what the challenges were in Limerick, as a city, but particularly from a public transport point of view when we are starting to think around what we might do with bus services and so on. I was also privileged to spend some time in the bus depot in Limerick, where we are preparing for the electrification of the bus fleet, and to talk to some of the schedulers and controllers there in the operations centre in Bus Éireann's premises just to understand what their challenges are. I hope that I have given a bit of the flavour of my job. Having seen the authority from afar it is really important now to see it on the ground.

On the time commitment, I recognise that I am a non-executive chairperson. There is always a trap for non-executive chairpersons, particularly those who have subject-matter knowledge, that they might try to do the chief executive's job for him or her from time to time. I am also very keen to make sure that the executive is held to account by the board but we do not stray into doing the executive's job. To that end, I make it my business to be in Ireland for at least two days, and sometimes three days, every four weeks for board meetings and committee meetings. I am available to any member of the executive, particularly the chief executive. We catch up every week or every other week by MS Teams - technology is a wonderful thing nowadays - so we can have that dialogue. I am available to afford the time I think appropriate to this role.

In terms of priorities, we could have quite a long list. By definition, however, priorities are things we should be doing first and foremost. My priorities for the authority are, first and foremost, to deliver the best public transport service we can for the country within the constraints of capital and revenue funding. It would be easy to say "Let's have world-class transport across the whole of Ireland" but we have to be realistic about competing demands for funds. A safe, effective and efficient service for all parts of Ireland, where it is appropriate, is the important thing. This is not just about Dublin. We will make sure we modernise the offer and make it as accessible as we can. We are upgrading the bus and rail fleets, looking at station infrastructure and doing business-as-usual upgrades. It is important that we keep pace with modern standards and modern facilities. We recognise we have a big job to meet our carbon targets and encourage modal shift. Encouraging modal shift is about having a safe, effective and efficient public transport service so that we get people to come out of their cars. I have been in this game too long to think you can just snap your fingers or wave a magic wand and people will get out of their cars. You have to make the public transport offer as attractive as possible to get people to make those choices about modal shift. That is an important part of it.

We have some big and exciting projects. If you cast across the other side of the water, people would say those are interesting and exciting things being done in Ireland. I mentioned them in my opening remarks, namely, BusConnects, MetroLink and DART+. Those are big projects. With them comes a huge responsibility in the context of their execution, spending public money and being accountable to the whole landscape of users and non-users. I see it as an important part of my role and of the priorities of the authority to guide those projects as effectively as we can. Those are top of the list for me.

The Vice Chairperson raised the question about subsidy. He is right. There are not many public transport authorities in the world that cover operating costs. London gets quite near it but look at the volume and mix there is there. In terms of operating cost to subsidy to farebox, we are not doing too badly. In my time in Australia, we were down to farebox recovery of under 20% in some places. We are a wee bit better than that here.