Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Ms Donnelly. I read her opening statement, which is quite technical in nature and which contains a lot of jargon, last night. I had to reread a bit of it. I am not unfamiliar or uncomfortable with numbers, but there was a lot in it. She will be pleased to know I am one of the few people in this room who are able to cycle to and from the House regularly, as I did this morning and will do later. I do my best in terms of modal shift but there is a lot more we can do in that context to get people to change their habits. Twenty years ago, I would not have thought about cycling anywhere. Many people are probably in that space. They are used to getting around in the car and it is the default setting of how they get around in many cases. I appreciate people have to go shopping, collect family members and so on, which is different, but a lot of our journeys are done on our own. There is an opportunity, whether through giving or lending people a bike or letting them have one for six months, perhaps, with their use to be tracked or whatever, to get people back into thinking it is doable. A journey by car might take three or four times as long in an urban environment. Obviously, it will not work in rural settings where the distances are long and the congestion is low. Public transport is good and improving, but we need to focus on active travel. I know I will travel to the city centre from my house, about 6 km away, far faster on a bike than I will on a bus or even a Luas by the time I get to the station and wait for one. The Luas is a great service, but I can make the journey by bicycle in half the time.

The spatial planning point is very interesting. I recall being in the Seanad in 2016 and 2017 when the then Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, Deputy Coveney, told us 13,000 houses had been built, of which 7,000 were one-offs. While some of them were needed, the mix at the time was not going to provide for the density of population.

As for electric cars, they do not reduce congestion, even though they are being seen as kind of the answer to everything. They are certainly going to improve air quality and decarbonising the system as long as we can get the power from decarbonised electricity, which is a challenge in itself. We are all in favour of offshore wind and we discussed that with representatives of Shannon Foynes Port last week. Nevertheless, I have a car and use it, and if I were to give it up, I would start to lose my no-claims bonus for insurance and all that goes with the track record associated with being a driver. They are all complicating factors as to why somebody might keep and use a car rather than use, for example, a GoCar. There are reasons people are not changing habits in the way they might. I once asked Irish Rail whether I could drive to Heuston Station, put my car on the train, get the train to Killarney and be able to use my car when I got to Killarney, and I was told the journeys in Ireland were not long enough to justify that kind of behaviour or to buy carriages that would carry such vehicles. We need to push every journey we take to see whether we can do it in a more sustainable way. In many cases, people cannot, but for many other journeys, if people made the jump, they would realise the school trip is just as quick cycling or walking as it is in a car by the time you get there, queue to park and park, walk back from the car and vice versa. What else are we not doing that we should be doing to get to a better place?