Park-and-Ride Facilities
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-19
============================================================

Mark Wall (LAB), Kildare South

I really appreciate the Minister of State taking time to come to the House this evening. I acknowledge that this issue does not come under the remit of her Department. The work done at Kildare town train station is very welcome but the new car park is already full. Drivers cannot get into it every morning. People have told me they cannot use Kildare town train station because the car park was not designed to accommodate the traffic going into it. This is what the Government and the NTA have put forward as a fundamental change in commuting.
We all support public transport. There is absolutely no doubt about that. I have been calling for more public transport for Kildare South for a long time, including hourly commuter services to Athy and further on to Carlow. In a reply I received recently, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, stated the problems at the M7-M9 junction were related to congestion on the roads and that the number of accidents there was directly correlated to that congestion. TII is telling us the problem is congestion and the NTA is saying it has medium- to long-term solutions. Unfortunately for the people of Kildare South, they are left with no option but to hop into the car every morning and spend up to six hours trying to get to work in Dublin.
We need a Government policy on remote working that would allow those people, including up to 5,000 civil servants working in Dublin, to work more often from home. Increasingly, however, they are being called back to the office. If we are not getting park-and-ride facilities in the short term, which the Minister of State's reply tells us is the case, I ask that she encourage the Minister for Transport to promote the idea of remote working for the civil servants in his Department who are having to come into the office for extra days. The Government must take a leading approach on that. There are other solutions as well, as proposed previously by the Labour Party. Unfortunately, the Government voted down those proposals in a recent motion I brought to the House.

---

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/2026-03-19/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:45+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-19