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

As Senator Dooley said previously, this Government has three years to deliver. We have all the plans we need, including the national climate plan, the national development plan and very good rural development plans. It is delivery that we have to accelerate and be good at now. If I were to pick various projects, and I am trying to do that in each city, one of the key ones is probably the Connecting Ireland rural mobility plan. I do not know if the Senator has had a chance to look at it. It came out of the National Transport Authority, NTA, consultation with councils around the country. It is really good and gives local authorities real flexibility to come back to us with route alignments that they are considering. The experience has been really positive. In Dingle, a new regular loop service around the peninsula was introduced. The service used to run once a day. Whether someone got a bus depended on the lunar schedule but the service is now regular and has recorded a 25-fold increase in patronage. It is not only tourists but also young local people who find it a godsend. It is a similar story in County Leitrim where a new service is being tested and trialled.

The interesting issue here is looking at how to integrate other public transport services that we need, whether they are services for local health authorities, social welfare offices or Local Link services. That can also apply to school transport where, as part of rolling out Connecting Ireland, we can look at whether connections can be made with the school bus fleet transport mode. We have an advantage in that a review of the school bus transport system is being undertaken by the Minister for Education. Everyone in the political system is aware that the issue is a real bugbear for our constituents. As part of that review, there is an opportunity to look at integrating school transport and a revived and new Connecting Ireland rural bus service system. There are clear plans in place. If I recall correctly, they would need approximately €57 million in the next three years. We may get savings if we used some of that service to help us on the school bus service. That is exactly where we should be going.

I keep coming back to the point that we need to show the same urgency with some of these measures that we did during Covid. We were able to do things that the public service never thought we would be able to do in the testing and vaccination programmes and so on. We need the same urgency and can-do attitude towards turning things around in the housing and climate crises, particularly in transport. There were not many good things about Covid, but one of them was that people got to know their local environment. I bet the loop walk in Tulla the Senator mentioned was busy.