Noel Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)

The Deputy asked me to have a look at this issue, which I did, to see if there was an alternative to the phrase "any or all" or if it should be tightened up. I have considered it very carefully and came to the conclusion that the phrasing as it stands is probably the most effective. I will explain briefly the reasoning behind this.

It would not be in the interest of the national transport authority to hand out licences for services in direct competition to subvented services, unless as I outlined earlier in the discussion the service can be provided at a lower cost to the taxpayer. We may come from different angles but we are all here primarily to protect the interests of the consumers and taxpayers in this country, and not one company, whether it is public or private.

There is no ideology involved in this and we need a good public transport system. This has been well provided by the public sector much of the time, as the Deputy noted earlier. The decision on whether the service will continue to be provided by the public sector or a combination of public and private will be made not by us, but by how effectively and efficiently the companies in this market will operate.

The result of the acceptance of either of these amendments would be that every application for a licence, irrespective of its nature, would have to be considered against its potential impact on a PSO transport service. Amendment No. 15 goes a little further in envisaging that the other ten provisions set out in the paragraph would be applied to the consideration of all applications. In many respects, that would be a recipe for disaster.

We made a very definite policy decision in preparing the Bill that the consideration of the impact on contracted public transport services generally, including contracted bus services which attract State subvention — the PSO routes — would not be mandatory in respect of all applications and would instead be a matter for determination by the authority. If the authority is required to consider the matters in all cases with the full range of bus licences, it would do much irrelevant work. I have given the example before of a once-off event, the response that we had to make to the Malahide viaduct collapse. That was a special circumstance and if we had to measure the provision of services in that case against these criteria, the viaduct — thanks to the efficiency of the job done — would have been open again before the commuters could get an alternative service.

The Deputy made his argument on Committee Stage and I considered the matter to see if there was another way of phrasing the section. I have not been able to come up with one and the phrasing we have, as it is from a layman's and legal perspective, is as watertight as possible. The authority is allowed that little bit of discretion that it should have with licences of a specific type. It is not phrased in such a way that the national transport authority will be able to decide that it would like to see an operator working a route even if there is a PSO route beside it, which, I think, is the Deputy's fear. It is not designed in that way.

It is meant to allow the authority consider a licence application under relevant criteria; if it sees all the criteria as relevant, it has the freedom to proceed in that way but if it is a once-off event or a response to a specific emergency, for example, it does not have to consider all of them. I undertook to consider the matter but I could not come up with a better wording.

Question, "That the words proposed to be deleted stand," put and declared carried.

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