Mr. David Franks:

To pick up on the safety point, I stress that safety is our number one priority at Iarnród Éireann. If we did not believe we could operate safely we would not operate at all. We would curtail services. That said, we have been working with the Commission for Railway Regulation on a risk assessment of the underfunding we experienced. This risk assessment demonstrated very clearly that a lack of investment in track or signalling leads to situations where we become reliant on individuals to do work which systems would otherwise do. This poses additional risks. We have been looking at what we have to do to mitigate these risks. As I said, if we got to a position where we believed that safety was seriously threatened we would not operate. We would stop running trains on particular routes.

Recently, I commissioned an audit and I am pleased to say it demonstrated that there have been improvements in our safety performance over the past two years. At present, things are as good as we can expect them to be, but we require funding. As I indicated in my statement, we have a situation where we can no longer sustain losses. The balance sheet just will not support any further losses. We must secure funding to ensure we can continue to operate safely.

On the length of trains, I am disappointed we have not responded to the committee. I will find out what has gone wrong. We have very limited resources available to us and the majority of our trains are in service. We are looking for measures such as a DART ten-minute service to squeeze our asset base further than we do, so the same trains would operate more frequently. The issue of capacity has featured large in the rail review, about which I believe the Minister spoke to the committee earlier. We have included in the rail review investment in additional vehicles, which is what we would need to lengthen trains.

With regard to the Belfast-Dublin route, the arrival in Dublin at 8.59 a.m. is not something about which I am particularly happy. We have been working with Translink on this. A key issue is whether we could get a train into Dublin earlier. We have not been able to solve it, but it is part of the ongoing discussions on how we can improve the Enterprise service.