Christopher O'Sullivan (Cork South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

My question on rural areas is for Dr. Sloman. She covered much of what I wanted to ask when she responded to Deputy O'Rourke. The idea of moving to electric vehicles and creating cycling superhighways has quite often been met with a great deal of scepticism in rural areas. People think that these initiatives would never happen in their areas but I guess it is up to us to lead and to change attitudes.

In the past 12 months there has been a significant investment in cycleways, greenways and cycling lanes. In rural areas like the one from which I come, however, we do not have shovel-ready projects that would, with a bit of investment, lead to connectivity between rural areas and towns, villages and towns and between towns. As has been mentioned, part of that reason is the geographical nature of these areas. They have a lot of hilly topography and other geographical features that create difficulties. Much of it is down to the fact that we have intensively farmed agricultural lands so there is a reluctance straight away to see features developed. It has been mentioned that we could analyse the model used in the Swiss cantons, which is certainly worth examining. Is the answer an electric light bus service that regularly serves towns, villages and smaller rural settlements?

Cycling superhighways sound absolutely fantastic and are something I would love to see rolled out. However, from the experience so far, I can see immediately that there are barriers to such a scenario and an attitude of "Why can't we do it" as opposed to "How do we do it?". We used to have a terrific rail service but, unfortunately, all of the tracks were lifted and the land is now used for agricultural purposes. The idea of returning to the previous scenario in this regard has also met with a lot of scepticism. I will consider the Swiss canton model. Would a regular electric bus service that would be subsidised by the State in order to make it affordable be an option?