All of the numbers quoted in this discussion are passenger-journeys, which are pretty meaningless when you compare suburban with long-distance travel. What you need to compute is passenger-kilometers, which avoids counting a journey from Blackrock to Pearse as equal to Dublin-Cork. Done properly you could also sort out the contribution of feeder routes to main routes, and also look at usage of various segments of long-distance lines.
If Irish Rail and the NTA have not done something like this then they are effectively flying blind.
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