Mr. Tomás Ó Ruairc:

We are engaged in a review of the administration of the scheme overall and the fleet itself. I appreciate the points the Chair has made but the watchword on all of this work is "integration", which is vital here. By this I mean the integration between ourselves, the Department of Health and the Department of Transport and the various services under our respective remits. There is huge pressure on the supply of drivers and vehicles. One of the elements of the full roll-out of the "School Transport 2030 - Review of the School Transport Scheme" report is that, where possible and feasible, alignment and integration, as happened in the pilot situation, should be achieved.

To go back to the earlier question, the Chair is fully aware of the challenge we are experiencing there. I attended some meetings myself with parents in that situation. There was a challenge regarding communications in one particular instance and we worked very hard to turn that around, address those challenges and make sure that the pilot was established as successfully as possible. We will come back with the figure for the monetary costs as well.

I appreciate the thought behind the Chair's ideas but given the overall demands for public services in those different contexts, which at local, regional and national levels are drawing on effectively the same supply of drivers and vehicles, we have to work better together to make sure that the public gets the service it needs. Driver supply is also a subject for the task force that has been established under the auspices of the Department of Transport. Our own working group that we established on an ad hoc basis led to the task force being established. We are very keen to look at the end-to-end process to make sure that more people across all age groups apply for driver training, complete it and then complete those stages afterwards, namely, certification, licensing and so on, that feed into actually driving on buses. The task force is also looking at those.