Mr. Ian Talbot:

I thank the Senator very much. That is a broad range of questions. On the sustainable towns and cities, we were asking themselves this all the time. Much of it comes down to things like how there is the big picture, and then there is the policy to get us there and how long it takes. All of our chambers talk a lot about public transport.

We talk about a donut effect in cities and towns which we are very worried about and we are getting nowhere with things like living above the shop and city and town-centre living. Some of these measures sound ordinary. We had our 100th anniversary last year. Some of our chambers go back to the 1700s. We turned 100 last year post-Independence as Chambers Ireland. We looked at the agenda for the first meeting in 1923. They talked about education, public transport, shipping routes, tariffs and the price of petrol. We are talking about the same things 100 years later, albeit at a different level.

In Copenhagen in Denmark, they have the 15 or 20 minute city concept, which means everything is within that range. That includes services, schools, education systems and so on. We are not necessarily starting from the best place. We are where we are. However, continued investment into public transport and into making our towns and cities liveable places will help. These measures will also help the restaurant trade, for example. If people are leaving the cities and town centres to go to the suburbs every night, they are not in town to eat in town-centre restaurants. Those are the reasons we continue to call for investment and infrastructure to help make towns and cities more sustainable.

Water is of course another issue. There are towns around the country that cannot develop anymore housing in or outside the town centre as there is no water or sewerage infrastructure available. We stopped investing for many years - we may not have been great to start with - and we have a growing population. We have a lot of challenges coming at the same time.

Briefly, on our international connection, I mentioned our global colleagues, the International Chamber of Commerce. It has observer status at the UN and does a considerable amount of work. I was smiling thinking about it, as the Senator spoke. An awful lot of the work that we do in Ireland and that other countries also do is contributing to help developing countries. The ICC has over 100 member countries. Much of the work we do is based on trying to share the successes we have had with those countries to help bring them along. Countries such as India, which has a population of 1.2 billion, are trying to grow their economies. They question why they have to go straight to renewable energy when we built our economies on fossil fuel. There are difficult messages out there. From a business perspective, there are regular global meetings through the ICC. Zoom and Microsoft Teams are great for bringing people together. There can be 90 countries on a call hearing what is working well in other places and what is not working. We are trying to do that within the business community. Employers talk about these things with their employees. We have a target market of 2.75 million people in Ireland to hear about it through employees. We get that too.