Ms Deirdre Hanlon:

I will expand on that and assist Deputy MacSharry in the discussion on this point. The policy is driven and made at Department level. The NTA is an important player in this and it works at the level of strategy, technical design and interaction with the local authorities around delivery. At the policy level in the Department, the Minister has looked for us to put an increasing focus on this in the past couple of years. The funding he has secured for it has stepped up in recent years. We are looking at how to align the funding available now and in the future, which is unlike the levels of funding available five or ten years ago, with getting projects delivered. The delivery of infrastructure has been identified by everybody, including the cycling groups the committee and the Department have met, as a key and critical feature that needs to be delivered, alongside some other features which I will address in a moment. Our emphasis at policy level has been on ensuring the NTA is in contact with the local authorities to get them to develop the plans they need to develop. That has been done and now it is about getting the projects through, having them technically designed and providing the assistance the local authorities need to do that. It is also about getting the projects through the planning process. There has been difficulty in some local authorities with achieving progress in the planning process for cycling schemes. Decisions have to be made on the allocation of road space between cycling and other forms of transport. Some local authorities have experienced difficulty with elected members coming to a view on what is the appropriate way forward and on what they can agree to. We have place much emphasis on that thus far.

The Department also has a strong understanding that road safety policy and legislation, which are areas on which the Department leads and works closely with the Road Safety Authority, are critically important to cyclists and other people using the roads and footpaths. A number of measures have been progressed in the past while, including some by the Department and Minister, for example, the regulations we are discussing today. Others have been progressed with agencies such as the Road Safety Authority, which is doing the advertising campaign that is needed on the soft side to complement the hard legislative measure and get the message and understanding across.

Deputy Eamon Ryan briefly mentioned the normalisation of cycling. That is one of the critical things we are trying to achieve in the Department. We have a policy around behavioural measures. We have brought in a scheme of training in cycling that is being developed and rolled out in conjunction with cycling groups. Predominantly funded by the Department, it teaches children at an appropriate age about cycling and moving safely on the roads and about the things they need to be aware of. That has just started. We have been able to do that in the past couple of years and we are expanding and rolling it out further. We now want to evaluate it and look at rolling it out further for training older children and adults.