Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Gender balance on committees like this is something we must be conscious of, especially when we are in an era of such substantial public investment in public transport. We need to get it right and we know from the past we have not got transport or planning right. We have a good opportunity to do it now.

I will go straight to the report. I have a number of questions and will direct them to various witnesses. There is a startling figure of 95% of women who consider the car a necessity outside Dublin. I ask Dr. Leva if that is a European norm or if it is very peculiar to Ireland. Is it a result of our dispersed settlement patterns and the difficulty of having viable public transport because of those dispersed settlement patterns?