Mr. Jim Meade:

The Deputy is correct that freight was a major part. At one stage we were doing 13% of the freight in the country; we are now doing 1%. Our vision is to get into the mid-teens area of activity for freight. That is a big programme of work and will take time to deliver. When taking a piece of freight from A to B anywhere in the country by road or rail, rail has an 80% lower carbon footprint. We have detailed in our freight strategy where and how we connect with ports and how we can do the heavy trunking to ports.

We have done many detailed studies with industry to understand who now wants to use freight. Twenty years ago people would argue it cost 50c per tonne more by rail than by road, so they went by road. Now we see from our detailed research with several areas of industry that they need and want to decarbonise for their CSR. There is a large organisation in the mid-west which has asked us to please put its containers on our train. They are almost saying they do mind the cost because their global headquarters are saying they have the worst carbon footprint of any of their facilities. They want to put their products on rail to reduce their carbon footprint. We see that in the agrifood and farm industries, where people want to move to rail. Some commentators say Ireland is too short of a haul for rail. It is not. If you go into big aggregates, like when we used to carry coal or whatever, you need big trains. We used to carry barytes to Foynes, shale out to the cement factory and gypsum across the country but now there is an awful lot of container movement in the country and that can move by rail. Shannon Foynes Port is interested in container traffic and getting empty containers into Foynes to ship back out to wherever. There is a lot of traffic on offer, we believe. The studies we have done tell us that. There is a significant carbon reduction in moving by rail, a significant reduction in kilometres done on our roads and a contribution to the driver age profile of the HGV industry, which is quite high. There are benefits all round.