Mr. Billy Hann:

We are operating 116 routes across the greater Dublin area and there are varying levels of demand across the whole network. We have a process where on a weekly basis we are looking at the demand for our services across all those routes. Basically, we are looking at information coming from the ticketing system, from the drivers, from our complaints system and from TDs who are representing their constituencies. We are taking all this information together and looking at it on a route-by-route basis to see where there are issues and constraints and the times of the day these are occurring. We meet the NTA every week to discuss all these issues. We then look to see where we can focus the limited resources we have now to provide the expansions to those services that are needed.

We have expanded about 10% of our network this year alone. Given the rate at which we need to increase numbers and resources for BusConnects and business-as-usual expansion, this is quite a lot for us. A process, therefore, is in place. Unfortunately, it does not meet everybody's requirements because everybody has different perspectives. If I were to talk to every TD in here, they would say they have a capacity constraint issue in their local area. I fully understand this but it does not always come to the fore when we look at the situation in detail and at the figures. While there may be anecdotal evidence on any given day that there may have been an issue, and this could have been caused by a myriad of different reasons, the capacity constraint is not always present. There are, though, times when it is there and we work closely with the NTA to try to address those issues and to put in place the additional capacity. This is how the process works and this is how we are dealing with matter now.