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

There is a separate case for such a Minister. To answer the question specifically with regard to the street level, I would argue the key pulling together is by the local authorities. It is not about getting the Department of housing or rural development down to street level because that is not their job. What would they know about the street level? Perhaps we have disempowered local authorities too much. This is my personal sense.

Local authorities might not always agree with me on the vision. It is a matter for the local electorate to decide who to vote for and what it wants them to do. However, one cannot say in one breath, "We want to give more power to local authorities" and then in the next breath say, "You have to do this". However, I think where there will be a steer for local authorities will be in this way. Increasingly, they will be very constrained in relation to budget. In recent years in the Department of Transport, we were pushing to expend all our money and we did, by and large, but in the next few years there will be a huge excess of projects ready to be built, rather than ready to be funded. It is appropriate for central government to say that it will prioritise funding for local authorities that help it meet its climate targets, are working in an integrated way in terms of the national planning framework and deliver compact low-carbon development, which is what we are clearly saying we want. For those local authorities which might decide they are not going that direction, that is their decision but they will not be able to access similar funding in a world where funding constraints will probably be our biggest challenge.

Returning to what I was saying about local authorities, I was involved in campaigning back in the day and I always remember the advice we got about looking at a street was that the first question to ask was what was the street for. One looks first at the function of the street, what is happening and the shape – the speed, modal share, patterns and so on – and it is only then that one looks at the design of the street and how one wants to split up the space. That can only be done by local authority engineers and so on. We have a problem that for five or six decades our entire system has been about how we get the cars through quicker everywhere and how we get out-of-town retail so that everyone can drive to that and park there. That has been the dominant thinking in all Irish local authorities and not only here but in the United States and elsewhere. However, increasingly, internationally as well as locally, people are saying that it does not work because if everyone is in the car, then everyone gets stuck in traffic and the streets then become a distributor road rather than a living street. It is happening. It is like what the Acting Chairman said about Croí Cónaithe. It is hugely popular and people are starting to take that up. Also the towns that think in this way are the ones where the jobs are going, where house prices go up, where investment is taking place and where you are in a virtuous circle. Towns that do not will fall behind. That understanding at local authority level cannot be forced. We can encourage it but it has to come from the bottom up, from local communities themselves.