Mr. Jim Meade:

There are two things here. The actual decision is several years away. I will come back to that in a minute. The modelling of the demand has been going on for some time and the Deputy is quite correct that the corridor is growing rapidly. We have grown right across the whole network. We had a minor reference there from Senator Dooley regarding Galway. We are heaving on the Galway route. From Athenry into Galway, we are jam-packed. We cannot get anymore people onto trains and we cannot get any more trains for them. It is happening right across the network for us. Just this week, we launched with the NTA the fact that we are now at 1 million passenger journeys a day in the Republic of Ireland throughout the whole public transport family. This is a new milestone reached and we are seeing people migrating onto it.

We have added new capacity this year. We have nearly all 41 of the new intercity cars out there. The public might be saying they do not see them but that is because the demand is eating up the capacity quicker than we are putting it in. There is going to be a pinch point from now until January 2026. I would not like to mislead the committee or our customers by saying it is going to get easy quickly; it is not. We will start seeing significant capacity going onto the system once we have the extra new Alstom DART trains. They will start to alleviate that. I firmly believe as soon as that extra capacity comes on, we will see more and more migration. We need to continue that programme.

We planned for this in a way. Back in 2019-20, we started looking ahead at where the demand curve was going and we were growing at 4% and 5% per year pre-Covid. We are back growing beyond pre-Covid numbers and we are growing ahead of that curve. We put a framework in place. We did not want to go to procurement just to buy the 41 cars and then go out again and again. Instead, we went out to the market for 750 vehicles, which is a really significant change, and 150 train sets and we put it on what is called a framework order that we could call down. We are hoping to place the third order this year for another 100 cars but we can just call that down and we do not have to go into a procurement process each time we want new trains.

The procurement process following public procurement and EU guidelines is a year and half or a year and three quarters. We have taken that out of the equation until we get the 750 vehicles. That is important for us. As we see the demand grow and as the Department puts the funding in place, we can order further trains. We need to keep ordering trains because we will need that capacity. The network also needs to grow. Adding track capacity is a fundamental piece of the All Island Strategic Rail Review.