Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Is an active travel aspect particular to this also? One of the difficulties and pinch points we have when we try to implement active travel is this conversation which goes on which is about the reallocation - I would not call it the loss of parking - of road space to other users to try to address that imbalance we have developed over 60 years of car dominance. Will there be a European context in which to present that because there is a great fear among some traders and shopowners that when one does this, one loses business? Some of those examples during the Covid-19 period of the emergency measures which were put in were very well used and brought a considerable amount of economic boom to towns and town centres. In the back of people's minds, they were saying that this was because of Covid, one could not go beyond 5 km and there were more people in the streets. There was always some kind of niggling argument going on. I am very interested to know in the European or overseas context how they have overcome that. I hold up the Dutch as an example of that and the Leas-Chathaoirleach was there and would have seen the success of that.

The other aspect of active travel is that when one has so many cycling routes and also very good safe pedestrian routes, it is so much better for people with disabilities and for elderly people. It is not just the cyclist that one is talking about or the school child going to school in the morning. It actually has an all-encompassing societal benefit. I sometimes believe that we are losing the battle on that and it comes down to a very polarised argument that we cannot lose car parking spaces. We want active travel but we also want our parking spaces and the issue is how we un-knot that. I will throw that challenge to our guest speakers, please, if they can solve it.