Rail Network
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-18
============================================================

Eoin Ó Broin (SF), Dublin Mid-West

The problem is that what the Minister has described is a very different scenario from what was promised by his predecessor, who indicated that funding would be announced and approved in 2025 and the project would be completed by 2030. From all the conversations I am having with public transport providers, I do not accept that the electrified depot capacity is the problem. My view is that the Government simply is not willing at this point to commit the funding for DART+ South West. That means the project will not start until 2028 or 2029 at the earliest and possibly not until 2030. The hard-working people of Dublin Mid-West will then have to wait another four to five years, which takes us into the middle of the next decade.
I think the Minister is misleading the House and the public when he tries to link the refusal to bring forward the funding for this project as a matter of urgency to infrastructural provision elsewhere in the system. Can he at least tell us----

---

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/2026-06-18/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:51+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-18