Mr. Jim Meade:

The short answer on the final part of that question is "Yes", and we have identified in our own strategies where we believe those sections will be. While we spoke about the Sligo road earlier, in the case of Westport and Galway we would look at double-tracking between Portarlington and Athlone. We definitely want to double-track from Athenry into Galway, given that if and when Athenry to Claremorris is completed, we would then be at a crossroads of the railway and there are inherent traffic difficulties in Galway. Oranmore into Galway by rail takes eight minutes, whereas by road at the morning peak it takes closer to an hour, so it is a no-brainer and we have the desire to do that. We have started a study looking at double-tracking from Limerick to Limerick Junction. We have identified areas throughout the network where we need to add double-tracking, which will add capacity to the network and frequency.

We absolutely have an ambition to put later trains to all our major cities and to go to an hourly service to all our major cities throughout the network. It does give us a headache, and we have to figure out how we are going to maintain the railway. When TII wants to do major work on a motorway, it will shut it and switch to an alternative route, but we do not have that flexibility, so we have to plan how we can carry out our maintenance cleverly and in shorter timeframes or blitz it in different ways. The network has been upgraded and continues to be upgraded, and once we get it to the condition it should be in, given it was let run down over a couple of decades, it will be easier to keep that maintenance level.

The spend over time is smaller if you do it that way. We will always have that trade-off and, not so much early trains, because we probably have enough early trains in most directions, but later trains are being looked at to all the cities.