Mr. Jim Meade:

To reply to Deputy McLoughlin, there is no question that the trains are crowded across the network. What his constituents in Sligo are telling him is no different from what I have been told by people in Limerick, Galway, Westport and Waterford. Our numbers have grown significantly in the past three or four years in particular. They have been growing at between 6% and 7% per year, and some segmental areas have been growing much faster than that.

We do not want to start teaching history lessons to each other but it must be remembered that we have come out of ten years of no investment. We have started the process and I am happy to say that just over a week ago, the National Transport Authority, NTA, gave us the green light to start procuring fleet because we need more capacity, particularly in the morning peak. The lead time for brand new fleet, not just for Iarnród Éireann but for the best rail companies in the world, can be up to four years. We have a plan in-house that we have taken to the NTA, which is has signed off on, to add more carriages to the intercity trains to which we keep referring. That is a slicker process for us. There are fewer issues in terms of putting them in service because we are just lengthening existing trains. We have started that process but, realistically, we will not see those trains in service until the summer of 2021.