Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank everybody for their presentations. Not being from Dublin, maybe I have a different attitude to a lot of this stuff. I do drive around the city, however, and I see what is happening. I do not see much evidence of people driving in bus lanes, which is quite good, but I agree they should be made 24 hour. I use bus lanes outside of the times they are in operation, but it makes a lot of sense for them to be 24 hour and that should be rolled out. It would make a lot of sense in terms of safety.

I take what the Garda witnesses say about education and stuff. That is vitally important. What you do see an awful lot of is people parking in bus lanes and cycle lanes. Before I came to the meeting, I saw on Twitter that somebody had pointed out to gardaí that there was a car parked blocking the path where they were pushing a pram, and the garda just said it was illegal and drove off without doing anything about it. That kind of stuff does not work and defeats the whole purpose, now that that tweet has gone out and hundreds of thousands of people have seen it. There is a need for an enforcement role to take place in the meantime, because if we wait for the Government and the local authorities to roll out proper educational programmes, we will be waiting a long time, unfortunately. There is a need for that enforcement role to take place actively, because I know from personal experience that if you know you are likely to get done on a certain section of road or you have got done before for something, that is going to make a difference as to whether you do it again. That is the reality of the situation. Even if you hear that somebody else has got done or something like that, that makes a difference and it gets out there. That is vitally important, and while we wait for the rollout of the education courses, that has to happen in terms of building people's respect for the law and for pedestrian safety. I would probably be guilty of it myself at times too, so it is very important we do that as well.