Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his questions. Next week's Council meeting will deal with the technical aspects of the fourth railway package, such as safety, interoperability and the European Railway Agency. We will not discuss the opening of the railway market but it will be discussed at a later stage. International traffic is liberalised. For example, the Belfast-Dublin route could be operated by anyone. The Commission is proposing to open up domestic markets - that is, journeys within a country - to competition and tendering. We support that in principle across the Union where it makes sense but, as far as Ireland is concerned, we intend to seek a derogation from it. The domestic rail market in Ireland is too small for different companies to compete to run services. There would be a significant cost to tendering for PSO routes and we might find that the only operator that tenders for them is Irish Rail. There would be a great deal of money in it for lawyers, consultants and others but there would be no outcome to it. Irish Rail could tender services if it wanted to but we will not seek a legal obligation on us to do so under European law and, therefore, we will seek a derogation on that.

The restructuring of Irish Rail is under way. That relates to an existing directive. It will involve a separation within the company to give an infrastructure management company and a railway undertaking. We had a derogation under the directive but we did not seek to have it renewed.

The standard HGV height in continental Europe is 4 m because there are many low railway bridges.

This is an area of concern for us because we want to maintain the 4.6 m height for Britain and Ireland, and we want to make sure nothing in European law creates a problem for us. However, there is no proposal to change the heights across the EU at present.

On the tracking of aircraft, the Commission will just look at the safety standards but the longer-term solution to this issue is the satellite tracking of aircraft. At the moment, this is done by radar, which stops approximately 200 km off the coast. Essentially, once an aircraft is that far off the coast, it flies on a dedicated path and if it disappears along that path, one does not necessarily know where it has disappeared, and if the pilot diverts from that path, one does not necessarily know where the aircraft has gone. We are leaders on this issue. The Irish Aviation Authority is part of a consortium, involving Canada and some other countries, that will move towards satellite tracking of aircraft rather than radar tracking, although that will take a while to happen.