Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

On where I see the 20% reduction, when I visit most agencies, Departments or other organisations, my first question is how many days a week do people come in. It has roughly halved on the level prior to Covid. Many people are working from home. This is of real benefit to rural Ireland because people are increasingly making decisions to work remotely. The digital hubs we are setting up in towns across the country are proving very effective as centres for enterprise and where people can work, not necessarily from home but from the local village or town. That is one of the ways we could see a very significant decrease in overall kilometre numbers.

Second, you could pick any town or county, but the most successful towns are the ones that have a really good sense of public realm and people have an attractive environment in which they can walk or cycle to school or walk to the pub and where they do not have to drive everywhere. Towns that have good urban characteristics, as it were, are the ones to which people are looking to move and where the investment is going into and businesses are doing better. The concept of the 15 minute town is a real one and a good one and it plays to our strengths. We have this incredible network of beautiful 19th century market towns. Some are doing really well and in others there is a lot of vacancy and under-use of the incredible asset we have. I am going around to councils -----