Mr. Jim Meade:

Certainly on the security side, I meet quite regularly not with the Commissioner, but with one of the deputy commissioners on security. A couple of years back, we recognised that this issue needed more attention and we recruited a security specialist who was an ex-chief superintendent. We are bringing that skillset in-house because we did not have it. That has worked very well. There are regular and ongoing interactions and operations between the Garda and ourselves. They travel on our trains quite regularly. The drug squad travels and brings the dogs, and they actually travel undercover as well. They have been very successful in all of those activities.

We recognise, as we said earlier, that we do have security and antisocial issues. However, we have moved forward in conjunction with our staff. We have a couple of forums working now where we get ideas from the staff and the Garda to make all that happen. I will not deny that it is an ongoing uphill struggle. However, we recognise the importance of security. It is why we have added a lot of staff onto our trains in the past two years – the customer service operatives. Adding staff exposes them to the potential as well, so we have many of the processes working with them. I mentioned the Garda hubs earlier. All those staff now have a direct phone link to the key Garda stations on the route and the Garda provide a rapid response when they gets calls from us directly. That is working very well and we are very happy with it. Is there more to do? Of course there is. With security and antisocial behaviour, we never finish.

Sadly, we have the odd breakdown. Mechanical things will fail. After one where we had a longer delay than we would like, we just went back to first principles and asked, “What are we trying to achieve here?” When I say it, the Senator will think it is very straightforward, but the railway people keep the railway moving. We have just shifted our emphasis so that it is not about rescuing the trains; it is about rescuing the customer and bringing the customer to the very front of our focus. That is what that report is about. There are some very good sensible, solid actions out of that such that we will always keep the customer moving and we will worry about the train later.