Brendan Griffin (Kerry South, Fine Gael)
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I thank Mr. Gaffney for his presentation. I concur with Deputy Harrington in regard to Mr. Gaffney's background and experience. It is great to see someone with passion along with professional knowledge in his area of expertise.

I have a serious concern in regard to the incident in Bray last night. It is appalling that this was done deliberately. This could have been catastrophic and the headlines today could be very different. I support Iarnród Éireann's and Garda efforts to bring those responsible to justice.

I commend Iarnród Éireann on being one of the only groups or organisations to have shown common sense and decency this week in regard to what it has done in regard to the cancelled concerts. From a public relations point of view, it was a positive move by Iarnród Éireann to refund fares and I hope this is acknowledged widely. It has been well reported in the media and was a wise and decent move and demonstrates the only common sense we have seen on the issue this week. Fair play to Iarnród Éireann on that.

Deputy Harrington touched on the issue of fares. There is some excellent value where tickets are purchased online. However, sometimes people have to make a journey at short notice and fares in that case can be very expensive. Also, people may not be able to make an online booking within a few hours of their travel time and feel they are being fleeced when they go to the station. Is this an issue Mr. Gaffney may tackle? I appreciate there are extra costs associated with booking at stations, but high fares leave a sour taste. Will Iarnród Éireann consider more flexibility in the case where somebody has booked on line but needs to get an earlier train? Generally they have to pay extra to change.

In regard to the long term, what is Iarnród Éireann's vision in regard to cutting journey time on inter city and longer distance routes? I acknowledge significant work has been done on this in recent years, but how will the reduced journey times be achieved? Will this require better stock or will it require track infrastructure to be improved? Are there other areas I may not be aware of, such as signalling or crossings, that require improvement? Iarnród Éireann must compete with our new and ever expanding motorway network, and hopefully in ten or 20 years cities like Cork and Limerick will be linked up. The possibility of making the journey quickly by car will make it difficult to justify the expense of taking the train. How will Iarnród Éireann deal with that?

Recently, a friend of mine contacted me about the DART app, which is giving wrong information about the last DART trains leaving Connolly Station. Will Mr. Gaffney check this out? Apparently, the app tells people there is a train at "X" time, but the last train time is before that. This happened last Monday and I received a call on Tuesday about it.

On a local issue, there is an ongoing issue in regard to the level crossing at Stagmount in Kerry, between Rathmore and Killarney. The situation there between local residents and Iarnród Éireann is at an impasse and local residents are aggrieved. Will Mr. Gaffney give this issue his personal attention to try to breach the impasse? If I can assist in that, I will be happy to do so. The issue is causing significant grief and surely a common sense solution can be found.