Public Transport Dail Éireann — 2025-10-14 ============================================================ Marian Harkin (IND), Sligo-Leitrim I thank Deputy Scanlon for the opportunity to address the issue of public transport along the N17 corridor. Deputy Scanlon and I are well aware of the specific issues and I agree with him that we need to find better solutions. I am responding on behalf of the Minister for Transport. While the Minister has responsibility for policy and overall funding in relation to public transport, neither the Minister nor his officials are involved in the day-to-day operation of public transport services. The statutory responsibility for securing the provision of public passenger transport services nationally rests with the National Transport Authority, NTA, which works with public transport operators, which deliver the services and have responsibility for day-to-day operational matters. That said, I reassure the Deputy that the Government is strongly committed to providing all citizens with reliable and realistic sustainable mobility options and public transport plays a key role in the delivery of this goal. I am well aware, as a Government Deputy representing the same constituency as Deputy Scanlon, of the transport needs of people along the N17 corridor and it is the responsibility of the Government to address them. However, the Minister and his officials are not involved in the day-to-day operations; they provide the funding. In that context, in budget 2026, the Department of Transport secured €940 million of funding for public service obligation, PSO, and Transport for Ireland, TFI, Local Link services. That represents a significant increase of over €280 million in 2025. This funding will go towards funding and subsidising existing public transport services and €31 million has been secured for continued investment in our rural transport service provision in 2026, which is a 38% increase. Funding of rural transport services in the Donegal-Sligo-Leitrim region increased from €7 million to almost €11 million between 2023 and 2024. The Connecting Ireland rural mobility plan is a major five-year public transport initiative to increase connectivity outside our major cities and towns. I have a lot of detail, which I will pass on to the Deputy, about increases in services, which are significant. Without going into detail, I can say that these increases in services have led to exponential growth in passenger numbers, with almost 8 million passenger journeys recorded across those services in 2024. As for routes along the N17 corridor, the NTA has informed the Department that it currently has no plans to provide a Local Link service between Tubbercurry and Sligo. I understand how the Deputy will respond to this as I have received similar responses in the past. The Department points out that the connection between Tubbercurry and Sligo is currently served by Bus Éireann and Bus Feda, both on a commercial basis. If the NTA were to provide a publicly funded Local Link route on these routes, it could result in issues of unfair competition. It also states that if the NTA were to provide a new route between Tubbercurry and Sligo, it is extremely unlikely that it would receive road authority approval to stop at any locations outside of the settlements already served due to health and safety conditions. I will respond further to the Deputy's supplementary question. --- 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/2025-10-14/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:04+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-10-14