INTERVIEW/Antoin O'Lachtnain Swords Express:The move into travel wasn't such a big one. Although his background is principally in IT - he was the former chief technology officer of Nua - Ó Lachtnáin also holds a degree in psychology from Trinity.

"My concentration was on user interfaces and how people interact with information and services. That was the part I was interested in," he says. "I've been working in that area for 10 or 12 years. It's how people and systems interact, how people can get the best out of it. Sometimes people grate against the system, they hate it, other times they fit into the system and it really works."

Ó Lachtnáin uses the Luas as an example of how the system can work well - predictable journey times, smooth travel etc.

"There should be a good reason for getting out of your car. The aim should be to give everybody a good experience," he says. "Just to be an experience that's okay or packing them on to buses, that's not going to cut it any more.

"People have moved on in Dublin. They're more demanding and appreciate better products and it's a completely different situation to what it was 10 or 20 years ago."

Ó Lachtnáin was originally interested in IT systems around transport. He soon discovered that there was more to it than simply technology. "It's about belief, it's about standing at the stop and believing the bus is going to come. If they don't, they start to feel uneasy. Communication, signage and the rest of it is important."

He identified a gap in the market for a regular service that would get travellers into town in a set time and applied for a licence to get the Swords Express up and running. The licence, which took two years to come through, allowed the service to take a route through the Dublin Port Tunnel, cutting valuable time off its journey.

"Transport is a big, complicated problem," Ó Lachtnáin adds. "It goes in all directions, there's loads of people involved, there's mega budgets - €5 billion projects and massive subsidies - and whenever you get a small company into the middle of it, how can you make a difference?

"I think we can make a difference - we go a different way about it. By having small companies involved there's diversity, there's approaching the same thing from a different angle and sometimes you can get a better result by just shaking the thing around."

Swords Express is the epitome of a small firm. Funded by friends, family and Ó Lachtnáin himself, the firm has a staff of one - Ó Lachtnáin - and gets its buses and drivers through contracts with other firms.

"Putting an extra bus on the road is easy for Dublin Bus because at any given time it has 110 buses in the garage. I don't have any spare buses. It takes time to schedule them and it costs money - every mile they run I have to pay for them," he says.

Without a generous subsidy to prop up fares, Swords Express has to charge a bit extra to fund its operations. However, despite this, he says, there is a regular stream of passengers using the bus service.

"People have a sense of confidence in the service," he says. "We have problems the same as everyone else - you hit traffic, every so often someone oversleeps, but you just have to go at it and fix those problems every time you get them."

The company is hoping to expand further, with new routes in Swords to take in some of the outer-lying estates. At present, there is an application is with the Department of Transport to expand the route to include areas such as Holywell and Applewood.

"There's a lot of people out there. Swords is quite spread out and it's not easy to serve with public transport."

Its main rival on the route is Dublin Bus, which has been granted a licence to operate an express service through the port tunnel. The semi-State company has come under fire in recent weeks for putting on extra buses on routes serviced by private operators.

Ó Lachtnáin is involved in High Court proceedings against the Minister for Transport over the decision to allow Dublin Bus to alter its route, a move that Swords Express says threatens its business.

With a Government subsidy supporting Dublin Bus, the company can afford lower fares and, with access to a large pool of buses, extra services can be put on where needed and when permission is granted.

The granting of this licence could be crucial to the future of Swords Express.

"It is all tied up with the Department of Transport. The court case is very important. We'll find out from that if we can continue in this business viably, whether we have to scale down operations, or just have to quit," Ó Lachtnáin says. "I didn't really get into this business to make a lot of money. It comes into it but the big thing is to provide a decent service and to do something that no one has done before."