Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

If I can stretch my time just a little please, I have one final question that is not wholly unrelated. Many of us in the Houses have experience of travelling throughout Europe.

It always astounds me when travelling to countries such as Germany, France and the Netherlands that an awful lot more work is under way, or has been carried out, on traffic-calming at the entrances to regional towns and villages. In fact, in France, for example, it is almost the norm, whereby if a motorist is approaching a 30 km/h speed limit at the edge of a village, it is physically impossible for him or her to drive any faster because of physical obstacles that have been put in the way by the local authority.

I acknowledge that TII is not responsible for the vast majority of our rural towns and villages because the network for which it is responsible does not encounter them, but there are many other locations where this applies. I am thinking of one in my constituency, namely, a village called Ballinderreen on the N67 between Galway and Kinvara. A programme of work is under way that will, we hope, minimise the speed limit-breaking that occurs regularly in that village. Has TII ever gone down the road of exploring that option in the interests of safety on its network? Where its network dissects small rural villages such as the one I mentioned, what work is being done to see what could be done? Obviously, maintaining traffic flow is an important part of TII’s function, but I would argue that a far greater part of its function relates to ensuring that, ultimately, we have safer roads.