Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

My understanding of the court case is that this was not a primary issue, so I do not think it has an immediate bearing on the court case. The judgment delivered was that the operation of the scheme does not establish the existence of a contract and the judge was satisfied on the evidence that there was no contract within the meaning of the directive or regulations, and that the provisions of the remedies directive and remedies regulations do not apply. The court's finding was that it was not directly related to profit. We do not conduct a parallel accounting service in Bus Éireann. It has its own accounting service which engages external auditors to sign off on the accounts. Bus Éireann has assured us it does not use the school transport allocation to subsidise other aspects of its business or take money from the allocation. This has been signed off by Bus Éireann and the external accountants. The key issue is that over the past five years we have been pressing Bus Éireann on reducing costs across the board. As we have reduced spend the company has talked us through many of the efficiency measures it has undertaken and we have been working it through with them. These efficiency measures have been across the board in the provision of all of its services. We work very closely with Bus Éireann and encourage it to reduce what we must pay it to operate services.