National Transport Authority
Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-14
============================================================

Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel

The Minister of State has mentioned that the 717 is a private service that is going to be cut. We have talked about the Expressway service being a private service that has a public service obligation, but that we have to wait for the market to respond. I understand the market to mean the private sector. The Minister of State might clarify whether the market means something else within this context. My concern is that there will be a massive gap for people. I appreciate that this does not pertain to the Minister of State’s Department but it is a question of rural connectivity. There is a huge gap.
The NTA has told me there is no funding available to fill these gaps, so the Department needs to make a commitment. I do not see that the market, or the private sector, is going to respond in any clear way, since we know that Expressway has already said it is not financially viable for it. Why would it be different for a different provider? What we actually know is that the NTA has said it does not have funding to deal with these routes.

---

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/seanad/2026-04-14/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-14