Ms Laura Behan:

Undoubtedly, investment in public transport is significant and costly. We are very willing to undertake it for climate reasons and a variety of other reasons. However, it is internationally acknowledged that as we progress, transition to the use of alternative fuels will provide the most cost-effective pathway for the transport sector to decarbonise between now and 2050. As the technologies become mass produced and more widely available, their cost will reduce and it will essentially become just a cost of replacing existing vehicles, which happens anyway.

It is true that in the national mitigation plan the incentivisation of electric vehicles is the most expensive cost on the marginal abatement cost curve. This is because of the price differential that exists between electric and non-electric vehicles and the significant cost of incentives to try to bridge customer acceptance and cost barriers. The cost differential is significant. We expect that over time this cost differential will fall and it is likely that alternative fuel technologies will become cheaper to manufacture than what is required for existing vehicles. This is important.

This year, the Government published its national adaptation framework within which all Departments and sectors are working to produce their own sectoral adaptation plans. The Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport is tasked with writing the transport sectoral framework and we are working with the other key infrastructure Departments. With our various stakeholders and agencies we are identifying and mapping the critical infrastructure, mapping the impact of climate on the critical infrastructure and making an estimate of what we call the adaptation cost, which is the investment necessary to ensure we maintain transport infrastructure and services as we see various climate impacts. This work is well under way.

In the case of the specific rail line mentioned, Irish Rail is well advanced in mapping its infrastructural vulnerabilities and assessing the various programmes that will be necessary to shore up - which is a phrase I hate to use in this context - and maintain infrastructure and services. This will all feed into our transport adaptation plan as it is written.