Mr. Jim Meade:

I will start with the Waterford North Quays project. I am happy to say the Waterford North Quays project is going very well. We are led by Waterford City and County Council and we are supporting that, as opposed to leading it. We are pretty much still on target for quarter 2 of 2026 to do the transfer. The contractor is doing very well, there are no issues with the contractor. It is the new BAM in there and it is really getting stuck into delivering well and on time. From our perspective, the project is going well and is on time for quarter 2 of 2026 with no issues of significance. There will always be little bits and pieces in any project but there is nothing of any significance.

On the Barrow Bridge, we did discuss it here earlier but I am happy to say we outlined a whole series of works some time back that demonstrates what we need to do. It included the consultants and needing to do topographic and barometric surveys, the ground investigations, etc. We are broadly online with that plan. We have been working through it and it is substantially complete. We have some residual GI surveys to do but nothing major in the scheme of things. We identified both ships that were involved in the two strikes. We were able to get in contact with the insurance companies and there is no argument about liability as we have CCTV and it is clear. Both insurers are now just waiting for us to come back to say that is the cost for their level of damage. There may be a debate between the two of them regarding who did what damage but it will not be with us. At the end of the day, that is for them to sort out at the marine level. We are currently building up the plan of what we will need to do to repair it. We intend to do a bit more, as we have advised before, because we also want to automate it in the process and bring it back to our national train control centre, rather than having people up on top with it. That plan is still on target.

The line itself or the south Wexford line as we would refer to it - the line from there to Waterford - is in reasonable nick. It is identified in the all-island strategic rail review as a line to be brought back into service because there are options there for it. It is not in any funding stream at the moment and there is no direct plan to reopen the line. There is a desire there, however, as part of the all-island strategic rail review, to reopen it. Once the review is published, which should happen in the next couple of months, that prospect of a loop at Killinick, which can and will work, will be built into that design process when we get to that stage of the project.

The Deputy then mentioned the other side, that is, from Waterford going towards Limerick Junction. To enhance that, we need to move towards a two-hourly service. If you have a two-hourly service all day, that is when you grow patronage and when you get use from the service. We will not be able to do that until we have the extra fleet to deploy on that route. That will be a domino effect. We are putting in the 41 ICR carriages, as I mentioned earlier to Senator Garvey, but the real step-change will start to come as we roll out the 185 new carriages we currently have on order. They are coming in five-car sets or 37 new train sets. They will go in to the greater Dublin area because they are battery electric but they will cascade other fleet and train sets that we can then start to deploy on our intercity routes to move to hourly services. We want to go hourly to Waterford, Galway and Sligo and to go two-hourly to Westport. We want to increase the frequency on the main routes and on regional routes. It will give us capacity to do that as well. It will be late 2026 or 2027 before we get to the point where we have the fleet to cascade down on to that.

The Deputy's information on Kilkenny is correct and there is a limit of six cars. It is not just the platform as we also are up against the actual signal to start the train there. As the Deputy is aware, we have a loop in Kilkenny, so they are all interconnected. It is not simply as easy as adding capacity to that train. We sometimes run specials out of Waterford for major events or whatever - people down there might get into an all-Ireland the odd time. We know we cannot let them into Kilkenny if it is an all-Ireland, so when we do that, we come straight past Kilkenny. We have that flexibility.