Ceisteanna ar Pholasaí nó ar Reachtaíocht - Questions on Policy or Legislation
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-14
============================================================

Simon Harris (FG), Wicklow

Again, I am annoyed and irked to hear about this. I am not annoyed with the Deputy or Deputy Whitmore. State bodies have to be accountable to the Oireachtas and the democratically elected people. That does not mean they are always going to give us all the answers - I get that - but you have to at least feel as an Oireachtas Member of the Government or the Opposition that you are getting a proper flow of information. I will certainly take that away.
Uisce Éireann was raised a few minutes ago, and we have the NTA now. I do not work for the NTA or Uisce Éireann and I do my very best to answer questions but the fact people are having to come into this House and raise these issues because they cannot get those answers from a State body is not acceptable. I will personally pursue this at every opportunity.
I thank Deputy Ó Muirí for raising the issue. He is right; there are good, international railway practices as to why they bank holiday upgrades. He gets that, as do I, but there is also that important thing called joined-up thinking and the NTA, Dublin Bus and others need to work together to make sure that if one service is going to be down, another service is ramped up. It is not rocket science. It is not splitting the atom but it needs to happen. I will follow up directly with the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, on foot of the Deputy raising this today.

---

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/2026-05-14/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:56+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-14