Public Transport
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-24
============================================================

Seán Canney (IND), Galway East

Yes, for Galway. The second question the Deputy asked was why this has arisen. It has arisen because when one orders new carriages it takes about five years to get them manufactured and delivered to one's specification. That is the timeline. The carriages were ordered four or five years ago and they will be with us next year. I do accept that there has been an underfunding of our service. It has grown over the last five to ten years and that particular line has grown substantially. We need to double-track that line from Athenry into Galway and that is also in the strategy that we have in place. What we need to do first is make sure we can put in the passing loops to get more frequency in and out with the trains we have. I fought hard to make sure that we would retain that early morning train service into Galway, which we have succeeded in doing. As for the bus service, we are working to get that in place as well but we have to make sure that whatever we put in is sustainable. There was a bus service there previously that was not sustainable. That is something we have to be very careful of, that we are not just doing things for the sake of doing them and finding that they are not sustainable. I know that the NTA and Bus Éireann are looking at that at the moment.

---

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/2026-09-24/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:50+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-24