"At no time will our government have to hide the reality we face. We are fully aware of the difficulties that the Portuguese are facing when it comes to rail service," Pedro Nuno Santos said in parliament.

In response to questions from MPs, Pedro Nuno Santos spoke of decades in which collectively, Portugal has divested in the railways.

However, according to Pedro Nuno Santos, the government is trying to respond to these serious problems.

"We realised that we had dozens of trains pulled in and we are repairing them and getting them running. We are working with difficulty, but giving everything to solve the problems with the resources that the country has," he said, before addressing the international financial crisis of 2008, which destroyed an appreciable part of the Portuguese construction sector and lamenting decades of non-investment in the housing stock.

Before these positions taken by the member of the government, Social Democrat member Cristóvão Norte observed with irony that Pedro Nuno Santos had beside him on the bench of the "Ronaldo of Finance" government, Mário Centeno.

Social democrat Filipa Roseta, on the other hand, blamed the Socialist Party (PS) for dismissing people excluded from access to housing, handing them over to the private sector, and criticised the use of pension money (from the Social Security Financial Equilibrium Fund) to invest in the property market.

The toughest debate was between Pedro Nuno Santos and the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) Member Bruno Dias after the communist MP complained about the differences between budgeted investment and executed investment.