Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am conscious we only have a couple of minutes so I have a question for Ms Graham. I welcome the NTA's approach to the development of rural links which have been very good through Local Link. I would like to hear her views on some of the more detailed planning that must be done with those routes to ensure we are going to get that modal link, if we can call it that.

An example would be the route from Kilrush to Ennis. It takes two hours and 30 minutes to get to the train station, even though it goes relatively close by it after about an hour and a half, but because of the routing there is not an opportunity to get to the train station easily. Therefore, any of the services being rolled out will need more connectivity to the other public transport links. I know the NTA has been trying to do that but I would like to hear Ms Graham's thoughts and views on how journey times can be reduced. I ask because the difficulty with some of the rural link stuff is that we want to catch every village along the route between two distinct points but in doing so we then increase the journey time from one larger point to the other. That is a disincentive in the first instance. Is there perhaps a greater level of services that can be put in, different days perhaps or whatever, in order to try to get that journey time down and give a better experience? Quite frankly, people in rural areas are not going to spend two and a half hours to travel what they could drive in 40 minutes and that is an issue.

We must also be careful in our long-term planning of public transport and the transport networks, that we do not disenfranchise to too great an extent people who have already chosen, or are already living in, dispersed rural communities. They too will need improvements in infrastructure. There are certain significant pinch points like bridges and river crossings that will need investment. It cannot all be about providing a public transport solution to their travel needs.