Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Yes, I can. First, I am very glad that we have the restoration of the assembly and the Executive up North. I note that we do not yet have the timeline around some of the North-South ministerial meetings. That is needed to co-ordinate, and I am really looking forward to it.

We need to get down to business quickly, but we have to await the timelines around that.

I have couple of points to make on this. First of all, we must remember what the strategic rail review is and is not. It does not include a lot of the metropolitan plans. It was about intercity. We broadened the remit quite a bit over the lifetime of the study, but it is not about DART+, Luas, Cork metropolitan rail or even, I would argue, Limerick metropolitan rail. It must connect with these. If we are building Limerick metropolitan rail and we are twin-tracking and we put a new station in Ballysimon, then that impacts Dublin to Limerick rail times and so on. It is the same if we do a passing loop in Oranmore. It benefits Oranmore as a community, but it also benefits intercity.

The review did not include all the metropolitan plans. It is still a massive plan. It is a €30 billion plan to 2050. I would love to front-load everything, but in truth we have so many big projects, including the likes of Cork metropolitan rail, the Shannon-Foynes line and DART+. They are, touch wood, coming out of planning this year and Cork is already out of planning, so they are the ones that must be front-loaded. We also need to learn by example. Consider the NRA in the period from the mid-1990s to the late 2010s as an example of an agency that delivered major transport infrastructure projects in a cost-effective way. It delivered much of the motorway network on time and on cost with very good quality and we now need to do that for public transport. The lessons to learn from the roll-out of the motorway network are that it was about modular, standardised, steady investment every year. We need to be spending €1 billion per year every year, and particularly with Irish Rail. What is the capability of Irish Rail to scale up from having €200 million or €300 million per year for capital investment to having €1 billion per year for that? That is not all about front-loading, but about ensuring we have a stream of projects for the next 15 to 20 years so all the signal engineers and planning engineers know they have a career doing this for the next 20 or 30 years and that it will not just be boom-bust and stop-start. That is probably the most important thing. We are going to work with the EIB and the Department to look at this.

The first response to the strategic rail review is to go to Government before the summer with what it means, maybe even for the next 15 to 20 years. That will lay out the sort of priorities and project timelines we have, some of which are not in any existing NDP, such as the rail freight projects, for example. Included in that is the western rail corridor, which will be to Claremorris, not to Collooney. I am being upfront and honest here. I would love to preserve the line, but the idea we will be able to fund absolutely everything would not be fair or honest, but it is important we do the Claremorris to Athenry piece. The first action is to set out the rough list of projects we know are coming out of this and here are rough timelines. It is giving that 15- or 20-year sweep of funding implications beyond existing NDPs. I mention Irish Rail because it is the key agency in the case of the intercity routes. How does it need to be configured to deliver that regular, routine investment delivery? That is going to be the secret of success.