Mr. Hugh Creegan:

The application was lodged in September 2022 and an oral hearing concluded in March this year. An Bord Pleanála has now written to Transport Infrastructure Ireland seeking that all additional information made available during the oral hearing now be published to allow people to review it and make submissions. I think that publication will occur in the coming weeks. We are, then, waiting for An Bord Pleanála to make its decision on the MetroLink project.

Regarding the rail side of things, several DART expansion schemes are with An Bord Pleanála now. The application for DART+ West was submitted in July 2022, I think, while that for DART+ South West was submitted in March 2023. This month, we have given Irish Rail the okay to submit a third railway order for what we call DART+ Coastal North, which consists of improvements as far as Drogheda. The application will go into An Bord Pleanála this month. We are hopeful one of these applications will come through pretty soon and Irish Rail is geared up to move the project into the construction phase as fast as possible.

A lot of work is going on in Cork too on the major project there, namely, the Cork area commuter rail project. Works are going on at Kent Station and shortly a contract will be awarded for the double-tracking of the line between Glounthaune and Midleton. In terms of the Luas projects, Luas Finglas will be the next line that will go to construction, in my view. A railway order application is ready to go into An Bord Pleanála. Government approval is required for that, which I believe will come through in the coming weeks. If this is the case, then that application will be submitted around September.

There is, then, a portfolio of projects coming up. In fairness, when we look back, there have been delays in the planning system. We think this situation has much improved now. We can see that decisions are coming out now, and well-reasoned ones. We are now moving from a planning phase for all these projects into, hopefully, a construction phase for all of them.