Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I agree. Too often when we talk about houses, we talk about units and price costs and forget they are homes. That is what they should be, for everybody.

To return to something we touched on earlier, Mr. Dolan described the ability to enjoy the amenity of your home without having to move stuff around, whereby it has been designed with purpose, but people do not spend all their time in their homes. We need to look also at the public realm and outdoor space. When we on the Joint Committee on Transport and Communications were discussing the Road Traffic and Roads Bill 2021, which is before the Houses, we spoke about how we need to allocate more road space for pedestrians and cyclists to promote mobility and accessibility for everybody. During the past two years of Covid, a great deal of outdoor space has been repurposed for outdoor dining, accessibility and mobility, and someone mentioned earlier the differences that may have created. Is that difficulty to do with the creep of tables, chairs and other things that are put outside or is it the way we have gone about doing that? At the moment, the licensing for outdoor tables and chairs is a lot more fluid and easy than it used to be. What is our guests' sense of that? Is there something we need to address? We would all like to see better accessibility, more outdoor spaces and perhaps even the removal of car dominance in some areas to allow for freer movement.