Mr. Jim Meade:

The last point made by the Cathaoirleach is very relevant. For years, the Dublin-Belfast route has been crying out for an hourly service. They are the only two major cities across Europe, in two jurisdictions, that are not connected by an hourly service.

The Cathaoirleach also flagged an issue with capacity and infrastructure. We are starting with DART+ West, which is the Maynooth line. In order to rebuild the railway there will be some disruption. We are trying to build a new railway while operating a live railway. That will create a certain amount of disruption from time to time. Detailed planning, detailed notification for all our customers and alternative arrangements will be part of the planning process.

I will detail a couple of important facts with respect to the northern commuter line, which is now our busiest corridor. As the previous speaker said, the level of growth and housing on that corridor is significant. We have on order a couple of train orders in place. We have ordered 185 carriages that are battery-electric. That was a very deliberate plan by us because we know how long it will take to build out the electrification process and upgrade the track work to eliminate level crossings, etc., all of which makes the whole process more efficient. Those trains will start arriving and will go into service in January of 2026. The first train set will arrive later this month. There is a long and onerous process of commissioning and regulation involved in putting trains into service, so that will take us a certain time. That is regulated by the European railways agency so we have no choice but to go through the process. At the end of that, we will do one train set, which we call a "head of series", after which we will keep putting in train sets of that type. By the time we reach January 2026, we will have somewhere between eight and 12 train sets ready for service. They will go in together so we will see a step change in capacity on the northern route. These are bigger, brighter and modern trains with a capacity of over 1,000 passengers on a full train set, so they can really shift large numbers of passengers. They are commuter-style trains so they have double-leaf doors or what we call "two-thirds, one-thirds" on the side, similar to the DART trains and northern commuter diesel trains. It will be a real step change in capacity.