Ms Anne Graham:

I am sorry to hear that an older person had to struggle to get off a train and that is obviously not the type of service we want to offer. Irish Rail has recruited more than 120 customer assistants, particularly for those kinds of incidents where they can assist a passenger, and for intercity travel in particular. The problem is sometimes that those individuals do not identify themselves to the customer service agent, and that might have been the case in that instance. Generally, they are well-trained to try to see or foresee those issues, but if it is not obvious, or if a person is already sitting down and the agent has not seen the person moving, they may not be aware that the person needs assistance. That is the reason we have invested in additional agents, in particular on intercity services, to assist any person who needs assistance on the train.

It is usually because people need a ramp to get down off the train. On the intercity train, there is generally an app or a phone number that is made available for people to use to make sure that information is given to the customer service agent so the agent is aware that somebody on the train needs assistance. A lot of improvement has been made in that regard but, unfortunately, that incident does not sound very good. It might have been the case that the agent was not aware the person needed assistance.

On the capacity issue on the western rail corridor, we will certainly look at that. We have 41 additional intercity railcar, ICR, vehicles coming into service next year that need to be deployed around the service and I am sure the Deputy would ask us to consider the western rail corridor.