Ms Anne Graham:

In terms of rural transport and school transport integration, as we indicated, it is a pilot project being undertaken to see what will happen in terms of the cost efficiency, in particular, of using the same operator to run a school service and follow on by providing a rural transport service. It will make sense in some locations where the school is based in a rural area rather than in a town where the operator can pick up people in a rural location. We sought applications with regard to suggestions from all the rural transport groups but we received a very limited number of suggestions. Waterford came forward and a local councillor suggested the ones in Roscommon and those are the four that we are trying out now. We would like to extend the service, subject to funding being available. Before we would retender our rural transport services we would consider the school transport services that are in existence to establish if we could better organise the services before we put them out to tender.