Ms Sarah O'Connor:

-----and something that conveys that 360-degree experience of what it is like to have a very close encounter with a heavy goods vehicle or with a car is a really essential piece for people to understand why giving a wide berth while cycling is actually really important. That is something we can explore.

On Cycle Right, I know it is very keen to expand as it can. It is probably at a slower place than it wants with respect to getting the cycling facilitators and tutors in place. It is quite fixated about fifth and sixth class in primary school at the moment but the equivalent part of its programme is to roll out a cycling programme for transition year. We met the Garda yesterday to see if there is something it can do to plug that gap, and it is something we can explore.

On the Senator's point about modal shift, we have a new communications strategy. It has been agreed with the Department, with our own board and the road safety transformation board. Within that, we will probably restrict it to focusing on what we believe were the absolute top priority pieces regarding road safety because the Department has really extensive remit on modal shift and promotion. It ran a really fantastic campaign last year called Your Journey Counts. I know it will be rerunning it this year, and has taken that on. The NTA is doing really extensive promotion of Local Link services, for example. That falls within its remit and it is also doing pieces around safe routes to school. We have been quite careful to divvy that up and to work on what we think are the really important pieces. We play an important role within that but in going back to the Department, we wanted clarity to say that these are the pieces we believe are causative factors with regard to serious injuries and fatalities and modal shift is a bigger overarching piece of work. In order for us to make sure we are doing a good job on that piece, we thought it was worth delineating that and that the Department was taking responsibility for modal shift. I think that has been largely agreed with the Department.

I do not disagree with the Senator. It is a really important piece of the puzzle. Every time we move people out of the car and into the bus, to cycling or to walking, that makes it a safer environment across the board.