Mr. Jim Meade:

The short answer is "Yes". On our intercity routes we are now carrying numbers in excess of those we were carrying before the Covid-19 pandemic. We are particularly seeing that in the west of Ireland on the Galway, Sligo and Westport routes. We are seeing it across all routes. Some of the early morning Cork services, as Deputy Crowe alluded to, are full and passengers are standing by the time they get to Heuston Station.

We have 41 new carriages coming on stream. When we ordered those carriages in 2019, we were planning to put them on commuter trains around Dublin. We are now working with the NTA, which we meet on a regular basis, on the best allocation of those carriages. The majority of them will go onto the regional and intercity routes as that is where the demand is now. Intercity is beyond where it was. The demand on the commuter belt is now back to just under where we were before the Covid-19 pandemic because of blended working. The DART system has a little less demand. There are a lot of white-collar workers on the DART who do blended working, so it is at a little more than 90% of where it was. Certainly, the demand is on the intercity routes and that is where we will try to concentrate the new carriages.