Ms Anne Graham:

When people use a service like that, it puts us under pressure to do more and that is where we want to be but we are reliant on getting increased funding to be able to deliver on behalf of the people of Carlow.

Regarding the bus service from Dublin to Carlow, which would have served Dublin Airport, as I said in my opening statement, we know there are no conditions in place on licensed services that they must provide a wheelchair-accessible service. We did a lot of work on that in the lead up to 2019 and consulted with operators as well as with the public and we put a scheme in place but, unfortunately, Covid hit so we were not able to impose something that was going to put a financial burden on the operators at that stage. They were already facing significant challenges because of the loss of passenger services and they needed financial support during Covid to ensure we still had some services left post Covid. We are doing that exercise again and we are seeing whether anything else can be added, including emission standards, which are very important. That work will go out for public consultation this quarter and we hope to complete that work at the end of the year so we can start imposing those kind of standards on our commercial services - commercial services that do not receive a subsidy. There is the potential for a solution in that case.