Mr. Hugh Creegan:

We are happy to try to deal with some of the hard cases. The child fare is the hardest one of all. Another one we are seeing is whether it is technically possible for us to do a fare between different zones. At the moment, the fares are targeted from wherever you are towards Dublin and it covers all the journeys in between but we may be able to do another fare that just covers from zones 2 to 3 and zones 3 to 4. We are seeing whether that is technically possible with the system we have.

The overall picture is what I outlined. There was an unfair, inequitable system there before. We think what we have now is much more equitable. We accept there are winners and losers in it and we are trying to put in some fixes, particularly on the child fares and maybe on the other ones to see if we can take the hardest cases out of it. In the long term, we would be reticent to reverse. We could not justify some of the steep increases we had at the end of commuter zone to the intercity zones previously. We would be loath to reverse in that direction.