Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am not trying to be negative. I am being positive about a lot of the stuff. A place like Dún Laoghaire has so many buildings that are not being used in the way they should be able to be used. They do not all have to become shops again. Some of them could be residential properties Quite often, there is empty space above the shops. This applies not just to Dún Laoghaire but to towns all over Ireland, both urban and more rural.

Regarding road pricing as a concept, I appreciate we had the toll on the M50 at one particular point and I am not in favour of pricing the M50 exclusively because it just shifts a lot of traffic off the M50 on to other roads but would there be merit in considering it when public transport is much better and when there are alternatives? For example, if driving on a rural road in Connemara at 8.30 p.m. on a Tuesday evening, a motorist pays a certain price but if he or she wants to travel on the N11 at 8.30 a.m. on Monday, he or she pays a significantly higher price because there are alternatives. At the moment, motorists pay road tax regardless of whether they drive 1 km or 100,000 km per year. It is almost a case of having paid road tax and insurance, they have met all the fixed outlay and the marginal cost is just the fuel, which is more expensive than before. Is there merit in a road pricing model? It could be a very low rate but there is an incentive to not use the car, perhaps through satellite technology. I would like it to be a revenue-neutral kind of thing where road tax would be scrapped in order that people do not have to pay road tax just for owning a car but every time they use the car, there is a charge so if they were an average user, they would not pay much more than their road tax while if they use their car a lot, they would pay more. Again, it would be priced on a rural versus urban model so the charge would be lower where there are no alternatives to using a car while if there were lots of alternatives at peak times, they would pay more to use that road. Is this being considered in trying to bring about the modal shift? If every time they use their car, it is costing them money, maybe they will jump on a bus if it is there as opposed to now where there is no real penalty for using the M50 at 4.30 p.m. on Friday vis-à-visusing it three hours later or three hours earlier.