Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent)

I am glad to get the opportunity to ask the Minister of State to provide enough trains and carriages to bring the people from Kerry up to Dublin on Saturday and to bring them home. We are taking on Tyrone and we need our supporters there. We hope we will win the match. We will be looking for more trains then to come up again.

We have one train service that operates at different hours of the day from Tralee through Killarney and onto Mallow. We are very forlorn in that there is not even a dining car or trolley car on that train. We are three hours and 20 minutes away from Dublin. I recall a time when my father was coming up here and he appreciated a dining car where he could get his breakfast on the train. That is not available anymore. Why is that? I am asking the Minister of State to rectify that. It not on at all in today's service for people to come all the way to Mallow. Sometimes they may get it on the Cork train if they change at Mallow. The service we are getting at the minute is not good enough.

Between Mallow and Tralee and Killarney and Tralee, only one junction is not automated. This is the junction at the gates at Stagmount, Rathmore. I have asked Iarnród Éireann several times before to provide an automated crossing there. It is the only junction without one. When I submitted a parliamentary question, I was told there were 130 of them in the country, but it is the only one on the Mallow to Killarney line that is not automated. There are 14 families, including young women and children, crossing these gates several times per day and late at night. We are coming into the wintertime again. They have to get out to open the gate and have to go back to close it. In this day of age, they are afraid of having to do that.

I am appealing to the Minister of State now, and I am expecting him to react to this, to put in an automated crossing for the people of Stagmount in Rathmore. They have been waiting long enough for it. We have been asking for it for 15 or 16 years. I am appealing to the Minister of State, in his time in government, to ensure that the crossing is automated at Stagmount junction at Rathmore.

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