Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Can Mr. Meade outline the effect of the stoppages? There have not been services for five or six weeks at a time. Any service, including the DART, is the subject of occasional problems. There are leaves on the line, all sorts of things break down, physical accidents occur and so on. We all know that any transport system has the odd one-day stoppage. It is an inconvenience but it does not affect passenger trends. Has Iarnród Éireann done any quantification of the effect of stoppages on passenger trends? In other words, do people return in the same numbers after the long stoppages or does Iarnród Éireann lose passengers in the long term? Does it take time to build up confidence in the system when these long outages take place?

My second question relates to National Parks and Wildlife Service. Mr. Meade indicates that the RPS study will be done in six months. Will that include proofing with the various agencies who will have to have an input, particularly the National Parks and Wildlife Service, so that when we get the report it is a question of funding? Alternatively, will it be a question of going around the agencies to find other ecological problems with the proposed solutions and so on? That should form part of the study. I would rather wait nine months to get an answer that is comprehensive to all the agencies and is ready for application for funding.

It is amazing how humans can make life awfully complicated. We all pay tax into a central fund called the Exchequer. I cannot understand how we have created so many streams. The sources of funding are like the Nile Delta. It all starts at one point and it all goes to one place, that is, the people. There are a million little rivers, rivulets and islands for all the funding to go through. It goes to this one and to that one. I will put a simple proposal to our guests. We should look for funding from the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport. That is what it is there for. All these bidding wars are manna from heaven for consultants. Ultimately, all the money will come from us, the taxpayers, through the Exchequer. Perhaps the committee could suggest to the Government that it should take the simple course. If this needs to be funded it should be done through one agency that can provide the money overnight so that Iarnród Éireann can get on with the job.

I wish to comment on the investment in the wider context of this railway line. This reminds me of the argument about the piers on Inis Mór. A small island of 1,000 people has one of the busiest ports in the country. Was it justified? The answer is that we either build a pier or we do not. It costs whatever it costs. The Atlantic does not know how many people are on the island, it just knows how to send in waves. An all-weather pier that would do the job would require a certain configuration. We have had some fantastic storms since and nothing has moved in the harbour, thanks be to God. There could be extreme weather events anywhere in the system. The same problem that was mentioned by our guests exists at Bray Head in Wicklow. It is a constant problem there. Protecting from a one-in-1,000 or one-in-10,000 storm situation will take whatever it takes and we should not be shy about spending money. Iarnród Éireann is lucky that it works on land. Things would be very different if it had to operate in the ocean.

I would not like to see us spend the money and not have the service. That relates to another issue in Iarnród Éireann's port. I am always a little puzzled by this "intercity" tag. I mentioned this to our guests previously. We keep talking about the trains from Dublin to Galway, from Dublin to Sligo and from Limerick to Galway as intercity. I would hazard a guess that the customers on some of those lines are like passengers travelling from Greystones to Dublin. A large number of them are commuters. The big growth is accounted for by commuters because a commuter tends to commute ten times a week, five times in each direction. The intercity traveller, as we conventionally understood matters, went to a city perhaps once every three weeks or once a month. Comparing one with the other, we find a 20:1 ratio in some cases.

A doubling of the track from Athenry to Galway was mentioned. Looking at the passenger figures on the Athenry to Galway-----