Mr. Jim Meade:

With my colleagues, I thank the joint committee for its invitation to attend this discussion on the topic of sustaining viable rural communities as it relates to Iarnród Éireann. Our chief executive, Mr. David Franks, extends his apologies for being unavailable to attend.

Under EU directives, Iarnród Éireann is organised into separate businesses - railway undertaking and infrastructure manager. As director of the railway undertaking, I am responsible for our train services and the maintenance of our fleet and stations, while the infrastructure division maintains track, signalling and other infrastructure assets. The services we provide are contracted by the NTA and funded by a combination of fare revenue and PSO funding from the NTA. Service levels, the level of PSO funding and fares are determined by the NTA.

I wish to give the committee an overview of Iarnród Éireann's operations. In 2016 we carried 42.8 million passengers, an increase of 8% on the figure for the previous year, and 100 million tonnes of freight. We operate a fleet of 638 carriages across a network of 1,700 km, maintaining 1,000 level crossings, 5,100 bridges, 4,900 cuttings and embankments and a range of buildings and structures, including 144 stations. On a weekly basis our team of almost 3,800 people maintains this network and operates 4,300 passenger train services and 50 freight services. Additionally, Iarnród Éireann is the port authority for Rosslare Europort, the State's second busiest port, which handles 2.3 million tonnes of freight and 900,000 passengers annually.

On a national level, excluding DART, Dublin commuter and Cork commuter services, we operate trains on nine radial routes from Dublin and three regional routes. As well as providing transport services and employment directly, we are a significant contributor to local economies, with more than €53 million spent in contracting businesses outside the Dublin area for the supply of materials, goods and services.

The rail network also contributes to the communities we serve nationally by connecting communities to one another and major urban areas; enabling us to meet our national environmental goals to reduce emissions from the transport sector under EU and UN agreements; facilitating access for all to employment, education and health services; supporting tourism and local businesses; partnering with private rail tourism operators such as Belmond Grand Hibernian and Railtours Ireland; operating special services for events and groups, ranging from the GAA to Gaeltacht specials; and supporting the voluntary sector in communities through our Journeys programme which gives a free group travel trip to 100 community and voluntary groups each year to encourage people into the public transport system. However, we do not exist in a vacuum. Public transport in general and rail transport specifically need planning to support the effective and efficient delivery of services. Effective planning generates the population and demand necessary to sustain our services, maximise the key strength of the rail service at a national level and provide fast and efficient connections between population centres. We look forward to the launch tomorrow of the Ireland 2040 national planning framework and subsequent public consultation.

Like many public and private organisations, we have experienced a challenging number of years. Following the growth and expansion of services, renewal of fleet and upgrade of stations delivered towards the end of the last decade, a catastrophic fall-off in economic activity, passenger demand and Exchequer funding took a heavy toll. Notwithstanding this, Iarnród Éireann prioritised the protection of existing services as we reduced costs and worked to address the crisis, with the majority of services retained and new lines and services opened, including from Cork to Midleton and Ennis to Athenry. Thankfully, since 2013, passenger numbers have been growing again across the network. However, as detailed in the recently published rail review, we remain significantly underfunded - by an average of €103 million per annum – for the levels needed to maintain the current network and service standards. The NTA's public consultation process seeks to inform a policy on the future role of rail services in Ireland and examine options to address the funding gap. It ranges from significant levels of additional Exchequer funding to the closure of some rail lines, all of which involves difficult decisions within scarce resources. These decisions are not ours to make, but we will continue to focus on providing the service levels are contracted to provide. We aim to continue to enhance our services to meet the needs of the country and look forward to achieving the financial sustainability necessary to achieve this.

We are seeing growth again. In turn, this will bring us challenges to cater for growth in demand. With the NTA, we are assessing the options for the fleet expansion necessary to cater for travel nationally so as to ensure we will be able to respond to the needs of our customers in the coming years. This includes reinstating to service a small fleet of railcars that were withdrawn during the recession and examining options for new fleet expansion. Investment that will be of benefit to customers nationally includes: the introduction this year of our Customer First programme which will transform ticketing, website and customer service channels to enable us to provide for and understand our customers' requirements better; line speed investment which will continue this year along the Dublin-Cork corridor to improve journey times on many routes, including Dublin to Kerry and Limerick; the DART expansion programme which will build a network that will have capacity for growth on all of our services, including intercity services; and, in the long term, plans for the electrification of the network to further strengthen rail's status as the most environmentally friendly mode of transport, as well as enhancing performance.

While we face considerable challenges, we are also ambitious for the future. Tomorrow will mark the 30th anniversary of the establishment of Iarnród Éireann, as well as that of our colleagues in Bus Éireann and Dublin Bus. We want to maximise our contribution to meeting the needs of our customers, the communities we serve and the economy and environment of the State in the future as we have endeavoured to do in the past 30 years. We welcome committee members' support and that of their parliamentary colleagues as we address our challenges and ambitions.