Rail Network
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-15
============================================================

Seán Canney (IND), Galway East

I thank the Deputy for raising that issue. As someone who has been in politics since 2004, I am glad to see the demands that are now coming for rail and for investment in rail. At that time, the agenda was to close down the railways and people continued with that up to two or three years ago. I am glad to see that my colleagues in the constituency have seen the light of day and are now supporting the implementation of and investment in rail. It is a success story and we are now in growth and investment mode. There are 285 new carriages on order at the moment, with a total of 750 to be procured over the next number of years. That is an investment. What is happening at the moment is that we have demand that is growing every year and that is great. What we have to do is make sure we, as a Government, provide the investment to make sure we can meet that demand and give a good experience to the passenger.
The idea of a new train station for Louth has a lot of merit. We need to get the population there travelling by public transport rather than by cars and all that goes with that. Over the next number of year, I will look forward to making sure we invest. My two colleagues here are totally behind me on that.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-15