Mr. John McCarthy:

I will speak on the background to the TRA conference in 2024. Ireland is hosting the 2024 conference in April next year. The event will be held in the RDS in Dublin from the 14th to the 18th of April 2024 and is expected to attract up to 4,000 experts from around the world. TII is responsible for the delivery of the TRA 2024 conference on behalf of the Department of Transport, which is the official host for the event. We emphasise it is very much an event as opposed to just a conference.

The Minister for Transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan, and the Minster of State, Deputy Jack Chambers, are president and vice president, respectively, of the TRA. They have been very supportive of the conference and have attended a number of supporting events throughout the period and will continue to do so.

The TRA is at its core a research and innovation event. It covers all transport modes, including road, rail, water, aviation and cross-modality in urban and interurban or rural settings. The first TRA conference was held in Sweden in 2006. It has taken place in a different European city every two years since then. It has grown to be the largest research and innovation conference of its kind in Europe. The conference is unique in that it brings together all the sectors involved in transport and mobility, from the policymakers, planners and providers of transport infrastructure to the designers, suppliers and researchers. Key partners in the conference include the EU Commission and a range of European-level stakeholder partners, representing transport research and innovation across different sectors such as aviation, maritime, rail, road transport and logistics.

We believe the benefits to Ireland of hosting the conference will be significant. The event is supported by Fáilte Ireland, Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland, which reflects that. It will provide a huge opportunity to showcase Ireland’s approach to innovation in transport and initiatives adopted to promote sustainable mobility. The event will put us at the centre of the mobility research and innovation map for Europe. It will provide a forum for researchers, policymakers, owners, operators and suppliers to explore and share the latest technological and industrial developments in the sector while also looking at innovative transport policies in Europe and worldwide. It will also provide the opportunity for the Irish transport sector to network with our European colleagues and strengthen links with the wider international community.

A key task for us is to promote and build support for the conference across the transport sector in Ireland, Europe and elsewhere. As hosts, we are reaching out to key partners, including the UN, the OECD and other stakeholders across the UK as well as the US, Canada and Ireland. It will enable us to experience the future of transport and mobility and the networking opportunity will also assist us in framing our transport policies in a consistent way with our European partners.

The main themes of the conference are: safe and inclusive transport; sustainable mobility of people and goods; collaborative digitisation; and efficient and resilient systems. The tagline for TRA2024 Dublin is “Transport Transitions: Advancing Sustainable and Inclusive Mobility”. Around this, we have, as I have just mentioned, identified four conference themes. These themes cover all the major challenges facing transport, such as how we deliver a safe and efficient transport system while also recognising the green and digital transitions. The conference will address these themes using a variety of sessions at different levels, including plenary sessions, strategic sessions and technical and scientific sessions, as well as special sessions on specific topics. They range from different levels.

A number of high-profile speakers at ministerial, Commissioner and CEO level have been invited to participate in the plenary and strategic sessions. We have received around 1,200 abstracts and 900 scientific papers from the international research community, including strong contributions from Ireland that will be presented over four days in the RDS.

The conference venue will be built around an exhibition that showcases how research and innovation is changing all aspects of transport. This exhibition will be supported by key international associations representing all aspects of the transport sector. These stakeholders are also organising a wide range of side events that will take place alongside the conference, ensuring that all the major actors involved in European transport research, innovation and implementation will be in Dublin in April 2024.

The TRA transport conference 2024 represents an exciting showcase event for Ireland in terms of transport research and innovation. As organisers, we very much appreciate the time the committee has allocated to meet us today and its continued support in publicising the conference across the transport sector. We would welcome hearing any ideas or suggestions the committee might have for the conference and would like to extend an invitation to members to meet the conference stakeholders and see the venue. Registration is expected to open soon, for which there will be more information on the conference website, traconference.eu. I thank the committee for its time.