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

The Minister has come to the nub of it. We are spending €36 million on trying to create safe cycling spaces. We absolutely need to do this in Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Dublin. The expenditure is out of a total budget of €1.8 billion, however. Therefore, 0.02% of our overall budget is being spent on cycling. I am sorry but we need to be spending something like 10% of our transport budget to be taking seriously the issue of road safety of vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists.

The measures the Minister has listed, including educational programmes and encouraging people to wear helmets, are all to no avail if we do not take the first fundamental step, namely, create safe conditions on the street. Instead of pouring all our money into new motorways, dual carriageways and big roads programmes, which we are doing, we need, as a matter of urgency because people are dying owing to the lack of investment, to start creating safe space on our streets so we will not be crushed by trucks or knocked down by cars. The authorities say they are really keen to do what I propose. They are able to do it but they have no budget. They cannot allocate staff to this. If, instead of just spending the money on an educational programme for children, we actually made the roads safe for our children, we could reduce by 30% the morning peak-hour traffic, which involves us driving our children to school. We could be creating a safe space where they could get to school in a healthy way. Everyone benefits.

The nub of the problem is that €36 million is not adequate or right. We need a multiple of that. We need an increase in expenditure next year of €100 million at the very least in Dublin alone to build the six or seven key projects that are ready to go. The most important reason for them, in addition to the safety reason, is that if the Government does not do what I describe, it will result in gridlock anyway. The infrastructure would give us capacity. Dublin can work as a cycling city. The Government should give the money, not the 0.02% that we are spending on cycling infrastructure at the moment.

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