Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The first message is that it has to be focused, first and foremost, on rural Ireland. I thank everyone for his or her honesty in responding and think people will agree with a lot of what has been said. It shows the scale of the challenge we face. Someone said we could not have public transport passing through every town and village. We should set ourselves a target that every single village and town will have a public transport service. That is exactly what we should be doing. On cycling infrastructure, the first priority is that we set ourselves a goal that there will be a safe route to every school in the country. We should start with secondary schools. Currently, more secondary schoolgirls are driving than cycling to school. That is the reality in modern Ireland. It is also the reality that 30% of morning rush hour traffic is taking kids to school.

The car adverts always show us the ideal of a car moving down an empty road, while Deputy Dooley mentioned a just-in-time service, but we all know that has gone out the window in this country. There are cars everywhere. When officials of the Department were before the committee, one of them said we were at peak car use. We literally cannot cope. Adding two roads will not solve the problem. All it will do is add further to maintenance costs. Deputy Neville is right, or perhaps it was Deputy Dooley - I cannot remember who said it - that there is a terrible maintenance cost. If we keep building more roads, we will have greater maintenance costs and less for public transport. I do not believe, as I see in the national development plan, we have given up on the rail network. If we are thinking big and long term, we should be looking to electrify the entire rail network and have one-and-a-half hour journey times to Galway, Waterford, Limerick and Cork. At present, one cannot tell in leaving Dublin at 5 a.m. to travel to Cork if the journey will take four or six hours.