Mr. John Murphy:

We have put this question to successive Ministers. While we did not get a specific reason, we were told that times have moved on. We met the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, recently and he said we will have to look at how that may be structured. It might not be as simple as saying it is under the 2008 Act and now it has to be delivered in such a prescriptive way. We are not being prescriptive.

On the charter issue, I had a call yesterday from a member of the Department of Transport team who we engaged with when we met the Minister. I attended the National Sustainable Mobility Forum last year in Athlone. It is due to meet again at the end of May. The Department official outlined that a meeting was desired after the forum because many stakeholders were involved in it. It would include SIPTU, the Department, the CEOs and senior management of the various operators and the National Transport Authority, NTA, which needs to be front and centre in all of this. We should utilise this time when we are all together to put an hour aside to have a look at the charter and see what we can come up with. It needs everyone's input. There is no point in SIPTU trying to write one that does not gain traction with the other stakeholders. There is no point in the NTA dictating one and there is no point in one or more of the operators doing different charters. We see it as a collaborative and social dialogue-type of mechanism, that all the interested parties sit down and try to agree. We might not agree on the minutiae but at least if we had the dialogue, we could share our experience and expertise in order to get a charter we can all live with going forward.