Thank you, a Cheann Comhairle, for allowing me to raise this matter and the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Deputy Stagg, a fellow Kildare man, for coming in to reply.
As the Minister of State will be aware, the north Kildare area has experienced the highest population growth of any region outside Dublin county for the best part of the past 20 years.
Considerable excitement was generated some years ago when Íarnród Éireann decided to implement a long promised, initiative for regular train services between north Kildare satellite towns and Dublin. In recent months I have been inundated with representations from constituents wanting to know when the long promised funding for the upgrading of the Dublin-Maynooth line will be provided. People throughout the world know about the west Clare railway through the great song by Percy French. However, some of the experiences of my constituents on the Dublin-Maynooth line in the past month make much more interesting reading.
I am a great believer in public transport. I traipsed up and down from Kildare to Dublin between 1967 and 1975. Some other people and I wrote letters to CIE and Ministers on the benefits of opening the Sallins and Newbridge railway stations to regular train services and this is now being done, 20 years later. The people of north Kildare have been calling for a long time for the development of the line, but what has happened in the past month makes very grim reading. The train service has gone from bad to worse and some of the stories about it would be laughable if people were not so badly affected. Many people from the area have been forced to use their cars to travel to Dublin. One letter I received stated that the train has to go so slowly through Confey that it would be easy for passengers to jump off. Apparently this is not an unusual occurrence.
On foot of the representations I received I wrote to the chief executive of Iarnród Éireann who wrote back explaining some of the problems. One of the problems relates to "severe localised contamination of the railway by fallen leaves". He states that the leaves are compressed by the rolling action of passing wheels and the resulting mulch bonds firmly onto the rails causing a significant reduction in traction and breaking adhesion. He also states that compressed leaf mulch can affect the electric signal system, resulting in the need for manual controls at certain signals. He says that these factors lead to slower acceleration, slower speed and longer journey times.
The position would be greatly improved if the Clonsilla-Maynooth section of the line, which is only a single track, was upgraded. There is little point in Ministers encouraging people to use public transport if it does not operate properly. There are two ways of making profits, one is by reducing costs and the other is by increasing business. One way of increasing business is to provide a better service, and this applies to shops, pubs and railway lines.
I know the Minister of State is anxious to resolve this problem and I ask him to ensure the long promised additional funding is provided as soon as possible so that this service can be held up as an example of what a suburban train service should be. I will not embarrass the Department or Iarnród Éireann any further by quoting from some of the other letters I have received. I ask the Minister of State to impress on his Cabinet colleagues the necessity of providing this long promised funding as quickly as possible. Otherwise people will stop using the train service and will use their cars to travel to Dublin, thereby exacerbating the traffic problems.
