Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome all our guests to the meeting and thank them for their submissions. They have considerable experience of railways and lobbying for railways. They want to see railways upgraded and restored throughout the county. I am also conscious we have with us representatives from the Great Western Greenway.

I particularly compliment the submission of the delegation from north Tipperary. It was well researched and got down to the nuts and bolts of what it is to try to run a rail line in terms of costs and staffing measures. It suggested some deliverable objectives that could bring that line into greater use.

As I am sure our guests and many other railway enthusiasts and people with an interest in railways do, I sometimes look at the 1908 Vice Regal Commission map of Ireland and its light rails and railways. It shows what a proliferation of railways we had, serving all our communities. I am realistic enough to know we can never replicate that situation. What damaged the railways in the regions most was the advent of motorised vehicles, including motor cars. For approximately 60 years thereafter, we planned everything around the car. We now have dispersed settlement, which makes it quite difficult to run public transport services to serve those dispersed communities.

If we are to be realistic and want to invest millions or billions in our railways, we need to match that with proper planning. We need compact growth. We need to pick one or two towns along each rail line in which we will have compact growth. The people in those communities must be willing to accept the zonings and densities required to allow for the efficient running of the railways. The backbone of a railway is constant, measurable commuting traffic. Tourism alone is not enough to support a rail line but tourism can follow when a rail line supports itself. Along the rail lines in the areas our guests represent, are the communities willing to accept higher density growth within their towns and those parts of the planning system that communities do not take to too quickly? I invite Mr. Logue to answer that first.

There is another group I feel should have been represented at this meeting and I take responsibility for not suggesting we extend an invitation to it. South East on Track has done tremendous work. That area is an important part of the arc we are talking about from Sligo to Wexford.