Dr. Lorraine D'Arcy:

A point was made about getting younger people to live in town centres. Mr. Chris Leinberger in New York conducted research on where people wanted to live. He found there was an association between television programmes and where people wanted to live. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s people watched “I Love Lucy" and they wanted to live in the suburbs. In the 1990s, people watched “Seinfeld" and "Friends" and they wanted to live in urban areas. In Ireland, the soaps tell us that if we live in an urban area, it is full of crime and you will get murdered, and the association is made that it is a lovely thing to live in the countryside. There are cultural aspects to whether people want to live in certain places. We must highlight to people that the cost of living is lower if they live in these areas because they will have reduced their transport costs. Sometimes that fact does not communicate well when people are getting a free site from a parent, building in the community and can have a big house in the long term. There is a narrative there needs to be considered. As I said earlier, we have a top-down policy, but we the bottom-up that we need to understand.

A request was made for an example of where a greenway is linked to urban areas and I think west Limerick is doing that really well at the moment. A recreational greenway has existed for many years, but following investment, awareness of the greenway has been heightened among communities. In particular, in Newcastle West, where there has been some public realm works done over recent years, there is now a great linkage that brings the greenway to the town and an increasing number of children now cycle the greenway every day to get to school etc. This is what is really important. I understand that greenways came about because the investment was justified by tourism data because that was the only sector that had data at the time. We now need to see the transportation value and we need more research in that area to capture that data, as Ms Harvey has mentioned.