Michelle Mulherin (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I ask the Leader to invite the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Shane Ross, to this House. The media has covered the draft rail report which was carried out by the National Transport Authority and Iarnród Éireann which painted a very bleak picture of the finances of Iarnród Éireann, citing annual losses in the running of the operation and the requirement of capital investment. One of the propositions that is very alarming is that it might be better if we have fewer railway lines and reduce rail services to those between Dublin and Cork, Dublin and Limerick and Dublin and Belfast. The Minister needs to clarify there is no agenda and no destruction of railway lines in this country. I ask him to endorse the Government policy that we are to invest in public transport. Public transport does not mean just public transport in the three or four cities I mentioned. We have a requirement for public transport in the west as well.

An annual census is carried out by the National Transport Authority which looks at the number of passengers on every railway line on a given day of the year. On the given day of the most recent census, there were 1,100 passengers on the western rail corridor between Galway and Limerick, which by hook or by crook, they are determined should not grow and should not continue. Compare these figures with the passenger numbers on the Limerick to Dublin line, which offers four extra services in each direction and which had only 130 additional passengers.

The general line that people in the west get is the numbers using the service, the critical mass and that we do not have the population and so on. The truth is that all public passenger rail services are subsidised by the taxpayer and none more so than the DART service, which one would think should be commercially viable in its own right. Given that the figures for passenger numbers in the headcount conducted by the western rail corridor exceed the target numbers, we need a reality check about the future of the public transport system and the future of our rail lines, which should not be that they are going to be turned into cycle tracks.

If we are to have balanced regional development, which is at the core of the issue, we need to invest in railways and roads or else we will always be coming with the poor mouth. One of the key aspects of balanced regional development is investment in infrastructure, and transport infrastructure and connectivity is very important. A debate on transport infrastructure is long overdue. The Minister needs to come to the House to provide reassurance and tell us what is in store for us.