Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for coming in. I join my colleagues in congratulating both the Department and the NTA on the brilliant progress that has been made right across the country in recent years. It is making a real difference to this country, so well done. If they keep it up and accelerate, in a few years' time I think we will be able to measure real, significant change in how we get about in this country. The witnesses are at the very core of that effort.

Our guests are used to coming before the transport committee. There is a risk that this session becomes much more about transport and less about disability. We are here to talk about disability as it pertains to transport, so I might bring the discussion back to that. To cite a few personal cases, experiences or people I know, I am familiar with a man who has MS, and another friend of mine is a woman with early-onset Parkinson's. A third individual I know is an elderly man in Limerick who has chronic lung issues. None of those people drives. They find it difficult to walk as well. Cycling is their mode of transport. That is how they get about. An e-bike has given the man with the chronic lung condition a new lease of life. He really was locked in his home until he got a present of an e-bike. Now he can get around the city. He finds it difficult to walk. Of course, he uses the bus as well, but these are examples of people who really benefit from the roll-out of active travel infrastructure. We often think of active travel infrastructure as being for able-bodied people, but actually - I have cited this quite a few times at different committees - our disabled population, not all, of course, but certainly a cohort of them, benefit greatly from the roll-out of active travel infrastructure.

The opening statements concentrated very much on the challenges around providing that active travel infrastructure maybe more than the challenges of design such as the island bus stops. There is no perfect solution there of course. It is welcome that the Department has treated that issue very sensitively and well. Perhaps, however, we should be talking more about the general roll-out of the networks because, fundamentally, that is what will help people with disabilities more than getting the design 100% right with the bus stops and so on.

What I want to talk about is how we roll out the networks faster because the slower we are to do it the greater the disservice we do to the population that need these networks. Other countries have them. I have seen that myself. The Netherlands is cited perhaps too much, but I was in France and Germany during the summer - I travelled around quite extensively - and they really are quite ahead of us. Certainly, the Dutch are. They have been ahead of us for many years, as well as the Germans, perhaps. The French in the past few years have had a very different approach. It is much less about focusing on the quality and much more about volume and getting more kilometres. They are very innovative and creative in how they do it. How can we speed up our delivery of the active travel networks? There is a sense that we are treating these projects like we would treat major road projects, with excellent design, intelligence and creativity going into the development of the networks, but there is a tension there between that emphasis on design and quality and the need to deliver these as quickly as possible. That is my fundamental question. How do we speed it up?

On Deputy Feighan's point, perhaps the Department should be telling us what we need to do to help it speed up the delivery of these networks.