Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

With regard to the road and rail freight points Senator Mooney has put to me, I will begin by dealing with the point about the upgrade of the roads to which he refers. We are constantly working on that to try to make an increase in the funding available for the upgrading of our existing road network. I accept that, due to the cutbacks in maintenance in recent years, many parts of our road network are creating difficulty for tourism. We also know that continued investment in our road network is an important element of road safety. While I cannot give the Senator a specific commitment on the road to which he refers, I can assure him that in terms of the work in which I am involved in my Department, we are looking to maintain and then increase the funding available for road maintenance and road network improvements. My choice would be to work to upgrade existing roads as opposed to building new roads and other pieces of infrastructure only to find out a few years from now that we do not have adequate funding to maintain them.

On the Senator's point about freight, I will respond by making three specific points. TEN-T funding is, and has been, an important and helpful source of funding for our rail network. It has also played an important role, as I am sure the Senator is aware, in regard to our port development but in terms of rail development, it has played a role in signalling works we are looking to do across the city centre and also how we would upgrade existing parts of our rail network as part of the entire DART underground project, which looks to increase our ability to pull more carriages into Dublin at higher frequency, thereby providing an increase in the performance of much of the national rail network.

On the Senator's point about the western rail corridor, the real challenge I have is trying to fund the rail network currently open. We have the funding in place for that but it is extremely unlikely that in the near future, we will be able to fund new rail lines for which there is demand. However, in the interim, in terms of those areas in which there is an interest, I am committed to not to doing anything on those parts of land that would stop us at a point in the future turning it back into a rail line if there was a demand for that rail line to be used.

That leads me to the third point. In terms of the freight opportunity to which the Senator refers, Irish Rail is currently looking at the freight capacity that might be needed in our economy in the future to determine the role rail could play in that regard. Irish Rail's freight business has changed hugely in recent years. The Senator will be aware of the reasons for that, one of which is that our road network has got so much better and has provided an alternative way of moving the same material around, but Irish Rail is now examining the freight opportunities that could be there in the context of an economy that is changing.

For example, and this is something Deputy O'Donovan will be aware of, one of the aspects it is considering is whether anything could be done that would link up our ports network with a rail network, specifically in regard to freight. That comes back to a question the Senator asked me. That is the kind of work we would then be applying for support for under the European Union's TEN-T programme. That is broadly where we stand on the rail network, the freight opportunities for it and for the western rail corridor.