Picture the future Minister for Public Enterprise, Mary O'Rourke, as a young girl pedalling madly on her bike towards the bright lights of Athlone for some fun.
The Minister, who was reared in the old Hodson Bay Hotel, remembered the isolation of being out there as a young girl, six miles from the town.
"It meant that when there was a party or anything social on in town, you had to stay over with friends ," she said.
"As soon as I was seventeen and I got my hands on the steering wheel of a car, I never looked back," she said recently when she launched a major study on rural transport.
The report, compiled for Area Development Management by consultants Farrell Grant Sparks, found that one third of the rural population of this State either had no access to or serious difficulties with transport.
The problem was frequently not being aired because those most affected have no access to meetings or other venues where their voices can be heard.
The rural transport co-ordinator for ADM, Ms Erin Cotter, has been based in Longford town for some years. She said pilot schemes in the Midlands will form the basis for solutions elsewhere.
"Longford Community Resources got a wonderful scheme up and running in Ballinalee which provided people with transport to the towns and the hospitals. That has been taken over and is now funded by the Midland Health Board," she said.
She added that the exciting thing about this scheme was that the vehicle which was being used to provide transport for the people in the area could double as a mobile information centre.
"It also got together a scheme for an estate which is some distance out from Longford town where there are a lot of young women with children who have difficulty getting in and out to the shops in town," she said.
In Westmeath, she said, there were similar community initiatives involving transport and in one of the villages a deal was struck with a person setting up a taxi service which was subsidised and charged 50 pence a mile.
She said the going rate for taxis in the provinces was £1 per mile and this was very expensive for people who were frequently on low wages or in receipt of State support payments.
"It is clear that the lack of transport in rural Ireland is retarding development and what we hope to do is to free the system up so we can help put transport systems in place to meet the needs of the communities involved," she said.
Various schemes such as car sharing, hiring minibuses or arranging schedules with private bus operators or CIE would appear to be the way forward, she said.