Cabinet Committees
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-10
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Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

That is okay. It is a word that is not uncommon. Anyway, I have had my issues with BusConnects down through the years. There have been issues for habitual users of bus services who feel the changing of services or the reorientation of scheduling and so on has eroded what they would have had prior to it. Then we had all the issues around what were, in my view, over-the-top initial plans, which then got rolled back. This seems to have been a pattern throughout the BusConnects journey and I think lessons could be learned from that. A lot of heat built up that perhaps was not necessary in the first place because a lot of stuff that was proposed was then taken away. We will engage with the National Transport Authority, NTA, in terms of what is happening. It has made a lot of progress now on BusConnects. We need a good bus transport system.
That brings me to Deputy Séamus McGrath's point. Yes, I have heard similar reports in terms of reliability. Originally, a year and a half ago, the shortage of drivers was blamed, but we definitely need to improve reliability. There had been very good stuff happening in public transport growth and so on.
I will talk to Deputy McCormack again. The Deputy is absolutely correct that America, China and others are way ahead of us in some of this in the digital space. We need to catch up fairly quickly. I will look at the 5G stand-alone issue.
Deputy Tóibín mentioned the NDP. The Navan rail line is in the NDP review-----

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:27+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-10