Ms Tara Buckley:

The Senator asked about town centres. We have some members who have been subject to no negotiation traffic management schemes or new types of traffic management around their towns or neighbourhood centres and so on. There would be a reduction of around 30% in their turnover as a result. Customers want to go to the shop but if it suddenly takes three quarters of an hour to get to the shop when it used to take ten minutes, people are not going to keep going there. The frustration for our members is that councils have allowed out-of-town and edge-of-town developments by multinationals with large free car parks. That is effectively pushing people away from the town centre or village centre and out to the stand-alone shop, which is not doing anything to bring competition, variety or footfall to the town. It is just driving people to do a one-stop shop out there and never come in and support any of the businesses in the town centre. What we are talking about is mainly collaboration and community engagement as these schemes are developed. Food shops need to have delivery vans come to them so we have to be able to do that safely. Their customers range from people who can come on bicycles to people who can walk but an awful lot of their customers still have to come to do their weekly shopping in a car. If they are elderly or have a disability or whatever, they need to be able to get their car near enough to the shop that they can come in and safely do their shopping and get it out to the car. We would bring it out for them but they still need to get their car somewhere near the shop. We need collaboration.

We want our towns to be more vibrant. It is absolutely in our best interests but we just need more collaboration and engagement. We do not have data about our towns because we do not collect the data we are supposed to collect. There is vacancy and dereliction and we do not even understand the extent of it. We have very good people now starting to show the extent of it in their towns social media. We should be addressing this from the very top. RGDATA was very involved in designing the collaborative town centre health check with the Heritage Council. That was extremely useful. It was the most practical project we ever got involved with and it brought towns together. All the different people in the town came together with a blank sheet of paper to work out what needed to be done in their town. That brings everyone along from the start. That is a fantastic programme that has been left to sit where it is. We have come up with other ideas around the town centre first scheme.

We do not have the proper practical programmes. We do not have the leadership in this space. Our local authorities are floundering. We are going to appoint regeneration officers but they will be hired internally so we do not know if they will be properly trained or understand all the issues. I understand that the planning students in UCD are really disappointed. They have studied all of this and they will not be able to apply for these jobs. We still have a huge amount to do to try to get that community aspect. There is so much goodwill among these businesses to work with their communities. They already do a huge amount of work with their communities to try to regenerate their town centres, deal with derelict buildings and vacancy, get more footfall and more business and get more people coming in and enjoying their towns. We want to do that and work collectively to do it but we need some leadership and national engagement from the top.