Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 1 February 2017
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs
Sustaining Viable Rural Communities: Discussion (Resumed)
2:30 pm
Ms Anne Graham:
If full cost recovery was provided for, we could do so. The recent experience of the free travel scheme is that a cap was applied to the amount of the payment and no new entrants to the scheme were allowed. As it is managed completely separately by the Department of Social Protection, the NTA would not have been able to impose on commercial operators something that they were not able to achieve by accessing the free travel scheme or recovering the cost.