Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister back to the committee. I am always impressed when he comes here and can rattle off the names of villages and various places. He has a very good geographical knowledge and I was brimming with optimism when he mentioned Cratloe and some of the other stations on that rail line. We hope to see progress in this regard and that the Minister will plough on with it. We really want to see some of those projects in the mid-west delivered.

At the previous meeting he attended, I referenced the pricing of rail tickets. I hope he will forgive me if this is repetition but it is an important point. For my family of two adults and three children, a return rail trip to Dublin this coming Saturday to visit the zoo would cost €150.90, which is the lowest fare I could find. That is a return journey of four hours and 20 minutes. It would cost €152 to take me and my family from Amsterdam to Munich on a sleeper train, involving overnight travel. There is something fundamentally wrong with the chronically high cost of rail services in Ireland. I have already bought my ticket to travel by train to Dublin next Wednesday to attend the Dáil because I know what time I need to be there. It is possible to get cheaper fares when making travel plans a week or two weeks' ahead. However, for parents who want to load all the children onto the train, it may cost €150. The same journey would cost me approximately €40 in fuel if I were to drive from door to door.

People will only make the modal shift the Minister and all of us in this room want them to make when it makes sense from a pounds, shillings and pence point of view. I know much of the answer is to be found beyond this room. There is a role for my colleague, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, and it is to do with PSOs. There really is a need for the Government to lead on this, grasp the nettle of expensive tickets and work to make rail travel cheap and viable. The Minister is a fan of the train, as am I, and our colleague, Deputy Matthews, who is often at these meetings, is an even bigger fan. In continental Europe, one can get across several countries for the same cost as travelling from Ennis or Limerick to Dublin and back. That is wrong.