Frank Feighan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The west is best and that is the way it should be. I agree that we need to have a debate on railways and on the speed of same. Where I live in Boyle in Roscommon, it takes two and a half hours to get to Dublin. I had a Commencement matter last week to the effect that if we want to have an agreed Ireland, there must be a one hour train journey between Dublin and Belfast. It was mentioned at a breakfast in Galway last Saturday by the head of the Galway Chamber of Commerce that we really should be looking at high speed railways between all our major cities, because if one could get on a train in Galway, Sligo or Castlebar and be in Dublin in an hour it would do an awful lot towards getting the economy to the west coast, but that is happening. Great, exciting things are happening in the west and in the next four or five years that will be seen. Project Ireland 2040 has been great in that respect.

I mentioned President Macron coming here and I said that France will never abandon Ireland or the Irish people. Tomorrow we have Chancellor Angela Merkel coming to see for herself what the situation is. We are at one with Europe but Theresa May sitting down with Jeremy Corbyn is good and I hope that we will have a deal without a crash out in the next few days. As Senator Leyden rightly said, Friday week is the deadline. Great hurt has been caused by Brexit in the last three years and I hope there will be a good deal. Whatever happens we will have to repair that hurt in the north, the south, the east and the west. We can do that as politicians, standing together with our colleagues in the North and in the east.