Mr. Gerry Murphy:

Deputy Harrington asked whether we were considering a future tendering process at the moment for other routes. The answer is "No". We have made our decision and have decided to open up 10% of the routes and are giving security of the 90% to the companies for five years. Therefore, we are not creating an endless churn on it. However, we will have to consider the issue again in 2017 or 2018 to decide what we will do in 2019. The companies have the security of having the direct award for five years and we have no other ambitions in general.

If services are lost, for example, through commercial withdrawal on the network as has occurred in the past, that is an area where we would considering tendering services, but other than that we are not considering the big grouping of services - Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann - for tendering.

The Deputy asked about depots. They are owned by the CIE Group and are used by the operators. We have no legal access to the depots. We have a legal provision whereby we can require access to stations in order that we could require a commercial operator to go into a station but we have no access to depots. We took that into consideration in picking the areas. The depots that would service the local orbital routes in Dublin would be at the extremities of Dublin, generally probably available at low cost. The depots many bus operators use are very different from the Victorian depots that the incumbents have. They are simply hard standings with a very slick maintenance operation. We believe that the locations we have picked would suit that well. For the Dublin commuter routes on the Bus Éireann side, we believe that they could be serviced well by a very low cost depot in the regional area. As regards Waterford, as Deputy Ann Phelan mentioned, only approximately 16 buses are involved in Waterford and we believe that a depot operation could be easily found for that.

I will deal with the bus areas and ask my colleague to deal with the questions related to the rural hackney licence. Deputy McEntee asked about checks and balances in the contracts. I can assure her these will be very strong contracts with very strong checks and balances built in. I would draw an analogy between this and the Luas. It is run by a private operator, Veolia, with a very big contract. We are tendering with the RPA for a very onerous contract for the operator. Very similar provisions would be contained in a bus contract requiring the operator to deliver services, with penalties applying if it does not deliver them.