Mr. Donie O'Shea:

To respond to the Senator's question, unfortunately, the answer is "No". There is not one place that has cracked this. The NDA has done research on this with regard to international best practice. In fairness to the Department of Finance, when it looked at the disabled passenger scheme and other schemes, it did an analysis across a number of jurisdictions on how best to support and what schemes were in place in other jurisdictions. That analysis fed into this report as well. I do not want to use the term "best practice" because as soon as one puts "best" on something, it becomes nearly written in stone. There are some very interesting cases of good practice, from various things and in certain pockets of countries. In France, there were schemes down around Nice but it would not be widespread throughout France. Similarly in the UK, certain local authorities or borough councils have particular travel schemes. In Scotland, they had a scheme called the Postbus, which disappeared after the Covid-19 pandemic. I do not know why that was.

These schemes were very interesting in how they tapped into community-based schemes that worked in certain localities and maximised how they could best serve. They used phrases like "collect and connect". Schemes like that would collect an individual from their home and not do the full distance but bring them to public transport that was accessible and which they could use independently, or with some support. One has all of these mixes of good examples in transport. Interestingly, in the working group, a lot of people highlighted these as individual, standalone issues. They should be taken collectively, and that is why I made the case that we need an overarching, co-ordinated and integrated approach to this. If we keep going at this with individual solutions, that is all they are. They are individual solutions, and the system does not actually change them.