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

Thomas Gould (SF), Cork North-Central

I wish to update the Minister of State. This route was supposed to be in place in 2024. We are in 2026 and we are told the route is not feasible. Millions of euro have been spent. Some €85 million has been spent in five years and now we are finding out things cannot be done. How many other routes will this also affect? There are people there at the moment who are experiencing the cost-of-living crisis and are struggling. They are looking at this Government and the NTA burning money. That is what they are doing. They are burning money while people are struggling. The NTA told me that detailed consideration of the scale and cost of the measures has led to a decision not to align this route. Why was that not discovered earlier?
We have a situation in Cork where there is absolute gridlock, no matter which direction you are coming from, whether it is north, south, east or west. That is why we need BusConnects to deliver. What we have is BusConnects not delivering. We have areas like Clogheen, Kerry Pike, Sunday's Well, Upper Glanmire and other areas of Cork that are looking for bus services and were promised them. None of them have been delivered. The other area was Kilcully. All those places are waiting for buses with no sign of them. Actually, it is not that there is no sign of them; they are not coming.

---

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