Mr. Jim Meade:

It is quite right. Of the 41 carriages we have 33 or 34 carriages in service and the remaining half dozen or so will go into service during the next number of weeks. It is extra capacity by adding carriages to existing trains. They are not new trains in their own right. They are in the system at the moment. We are seeing a significant jump in ridership across all of the public transport family. Yesterday, we had a function with the NTA and the Minister marking a million passenger journeys per day across the public transport family. We see more people migrating onto public transport.

The trains will still be very busy even though more capacity has gone onto the Maynooth line and the northern and Kildare lines. People do not see that or feel that because the trains are still very busy. Back in 2019 when we started this process the real issue, if the pandemic had not hit, would be that I would be sitting in front of the committee explaining why, during 2020 and 2021 we were leaving people behind because we would have been. We physically would not have been able to carry them because we were growing 5% to 6% per year, every year back then. We have started there again. We believe, anecdotally and we have to nail down the numbers, that we look to be up 20% year on year this year, over last year, in September. More people are going back to work. We normally get an uplift in September with a new wave of college students, etc. That hits us every September. There is a significant growth in passenger journeys out there.