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

I understand what my rural colleagues are saying when they talk about the difficulty posed by rural isolation. There is no doubting that it is an issue. In introducing these measures we have to listen to what they are saying and recognise that we have a real problem, particularly in the case of older people and those who do not have huge social outlets. We have to consider how we will maintain connections and a sense of community. It is a given that it cannot just be by insisting people have the ability to drink and drive home from the pub. If only in the current planning framework there was a serious, concentrated effort to bring life back to the centre of villages and market towns, particularly the smaller, 19th century market towns that are dying on their feet because they are not of a certain scale or big enough to have momentum. In addition to introducing such measures, we need to bring life back to the high streets where the shutters are down on shops and houses are empty. We should provide fibre broadband in all of these towns. Street-front houses should be reconditioned to ensure they are well insulated and have solar power panels on the roof in order that they will be an attractive prospect for young people in which to rear families. From such places they could walk to their local pub.

There are lots of downsides to the drinking of alcohol which, as we all know, has caused damage to every family in the country. I would not like to have a system under which everyone drinks at home. There is a social aspect to pubs which we should not lose. If people are to have a drink, I would prefer them to have it in the local pub with their families, friends and neighbours, rather than buying a bottle in the local Lidl supermarket and watching Sky at home and not having a sense of connection. That is important, but it will not happen with a laissez-faire, do-nothing national planning framework. It states it wants to bring life back to the centre of towns, but there is nothing in it that will deliver on that objective.

If we are serious about ensuring road safety, we also have to think about how we will tackle the problem of rural isolation for people such as older bachelors.

Perhaps the new developments in town centres could have a mixed housing design and cater for people who would otherwise be isolated in, for example, rural homesteads that are no longer used as farms. They would be brought into the town centres and given a sense of community, but that will take Government initiative and action and local government action, funded by central government and other new funding mechanisms. That is what we have to do.

We must get the policing of this legislation right. It will be difficult to police because the policing system always tries to determine how to implement a law in a way that does not undermine confidence in either the policing or judicial system. Police must uphold and implement the law, but they do it in a way that is careful and subtle. That is one of the strengths of the Garda, although significant damage has been done to that capability by the way in which the penalty points system and the drink driving figures were distorted. I did not see or hear anything on this point, but perhaps the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Flanagan, will attend during the Second Stage debate to articulate what he intends to change. Surely at this time, when the State's policing of drink driving and the penalty points system are in such disrepute, we would have a clear presentation as part of this Bill as to how the new policing arrangements are going to work. I hope that the Minister, Deputy Flanagan, will make a contribution on Second Stage next year so that we can get details in that regard.

Certain elements will change as we move towards a zero-death figure. Technology is changing, and we will move towards electric vehicles and a certain amount of automation. Increasingly, we will move towards a car-sharing model. Internationally, the latest thinking is that people will not own cars, but buy a certain number of miles, have drivers come to pick them up or share cars with a range of people.

The Minister, Deputy Ross, missed something in my contribution on climate solutions last night. I was making the point that we were missing out because of our blindness to climate change. Utter indifference to the issue is one of Fine Gael's other major flaws. We are missing out on the fact that there is a clean, new industrial revolution taking place in transport. All the leading experts and thinkers believe that there will only be a fraction of today's number of cars on the road in five or ten years' time because we will have moved to a model of shared ownership and shared passenger usage. If we had a government that knew what was happening in the wider clean industrial revolution in other countries, it would be easier to answer the question of how to get to the local pub. Countries are implementing this model and changes are happening because of the low-carbon issue. The Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport should be considering that as one of the mechanisms.

My final point will reflect on those people who have died this year. The very first pedestrian killed in a road accident was an Irish woman by the name of Mrs. Bridget Driscoll. She was knocked down in London in the late 19th century. I believe that she was the first road fatality ever. It set a terrible marker for what was to prove in the 20th century to be a slaughter of people on our roads. It is because that slaughter must stop that we support this Bill, but we demand far more from the Minister such as investment in safe cycling infrastructure and public transport, planning and getting people back into our towns so that they can walk to the local pub, and setting out a new future for motoring in which people might not even have to drive because they would be part of a cheaper, better and cleaner new social service.

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