Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Under the legislation at the moment, under a Part 8 process to do interventions, for instance, or under Road Traffic Act section 38 interventions, it is within the gift of the local authority to make that time-bound decision and say that it will do these interventions for 18 months and then make an assessment. On assessment, one gets plenty of anecdotal information from people when you meet them and it is generally people who are against it who give their views. The people who benefit from the interventions, enjoy them and do well from them tend to be a little quieter about it. We very much need economic assessments to go hand-in-hand with those measures so that we can present evidence to people at the end of that trial period. I would ask children going to school if they enjoyed their walk or cycle to school more now compared with 18 months ago so that we can provide that evidence. As the Minister says, this is something that we will not be able to do overnight but this is the direction in which we need to go. We need to provide that evidence for people too.