Pauline Tully (Sinn Fein)

I welcome the all-island strategic rail review. It makes sense to plan our rail system on an all-island basis. The fact that it will be reviewed on a regular basis is also welcome to ensure that we are meeting the different targets set out, including the short-, medium- and long-term targets. I live in County Cavan where there are currently no rail services. Monaghan, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Donegal and north Leitrim do not have any rail services either. That leaves the whole of the north-west region without a rail service. We are in the bottom 20 of more than 200 EU regions for infrastructure development. I acknowledge there are plans to put in place a railway service form Portadown down through Monaghan and Cavan. I was told its timeline is around 2040, so I am not sure whether that is a medium- or long-term plan. That would still leave quite an amount of the north west without any connectivity. It is unfortunate because we had better connectivity 60 or 70 years ago. My parents remember using a rail service that came into Cavan, but next thing the whole thing was stopped. If the rail line had even been maintained at the time, it could have been upgraded. Instead, it was lifted and people were allowed to build over it and so forth. It is very unfortunate. I welcome the fact a rail service will be restored. I also support Senator Nelson Murray’s call for the rail service into Navan because that would help a lot of people from Cavan who would travel through Navan and on farther if they had a rail service from there.

At times, I use the M3 Parkway to park my car and take the train in, which connects at Clonsilla with the Maynooth train to get farther into Dublin. If the Maynooth train is late coming back from, say, Connolly Station or Drumcondra and people miss the connecting train to the M3 Parkway, they end up waiting most of an hour for the next train. It could be tied in better. If the train coming back to Clonsilla is late, most of the people going to the M3 Parkway are coming from that Clonsilla train.

Cavan people can use those train services, but a lot of Cavan people, especially those living in the south Cavan area, use the Sligo train. They board it somewhere in Longford or Edgeworthstown or maybe they go over to Dromod in Leitrim. For people working or going to college in Dublin, that train leaves Dublin at 5 p.m. Most people do not finish work finish work to get to Connolly Station by 5 p.m., however. They then have to wait until 7.30 p.m. A lot of people depend on that train but it is regularly late. People who get it in the morning are often late for work or college and it is often delayed in the evening by at least 15, if not 30, minutes. When it arrives at different stops, there are sometimes Local Link services that are not connected up with the train times. It would make sense to connect them so that people can do their whole journey using public transport rather than a five-minute delay causing people to miss the Local Link service, leaving them waiting half an hour or longer.

We need to ensure we have connections with our airports as well. The MetroLink to connect Dublin city with the airport in Dublin will be great when, or if, it happens. We also have airports in our different regions, such as Knock and Shannon airports. Public transport is needed in order that people can access those airports and that people, as I said, are less dependent on their cars. We need to do so for environmental reasons. As Senator Rabbitte said, a lot of young people are keen to use public transport for all the right reasons and we need to do as much as possible to ensure they can do so without depending on the car.