Pa Daly (Kerry, Sinn Fein)
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114. To ask the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport his views on significantly increasing the LocalLink budget to serve significant sites of Ukrainian refugees in local areas. [19261/22]

Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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In line with the whole of Government approach, my Department and the National Transport Authority (NTA) have been working on practical and meaningful responses to the Ukrainian humanitarian crisis. Local Link has a key role to play in supporting those refugees located in rural Ireland.

From the beginning of the crisis, Local Link services have been providing newly arriving Ukrainians with free travel to their end destination. And further to my announcement last week regarding the provision of emergency public transport services to those refugees housed in rural or isolated locations, I envisage Local Link having a significant role to play here too.

Work will be undertaken to accelerate improvements across the Local Link network, including additional stops, route modifications, and more services with the aim to increase connectivity between communities. Areas such as the Ring of Kerry will avail of such improvements, in practice catering for both existing demands as well as responding to the increased pressures on services where the local population has grown in response to the humanitarian crisis.

Additional bus services will also be deployed to cater for those refugees housed away from the existing public transport network. For instance, the NTA is looking at options to provide transport from the Earl of Desmond - where many refugees have been accommodated - to Tralee town. Such measures will provide better access to a range of amenities, employment opportunities and to onward public transport connections to larger centres.

I expect TFI Local Link offices to be fundamental in the management and administration of the newly introduced Community Transport Fund. This Fund will support occasional social travel requests to enable our Ukrainian guests to join in the many activities that are available in our towns, in particular, activities focused on youth, integration, culture, and education.

Collectively, these endeavours aim to provide a means of greater integration between rural and Ukrainian communities. I was pleased to be able to increase the Rural Transport Budget this year to accommodate these worthy amendments.