John Curran (Dublin Mid West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate on this legislation. It is an issue that I and others have raised consistently in this House over the past two and a half years yet the problem of the dangerous use of quad and scrambler bikes in parks, other public areas and housing estates is getting worse. The problem is growing year on year. During the summer there was a very serious case in one of our parks in Darndale, and there have been fatalities also. Their use is not just a nuisance factor; it involves real danger.

This is an issue local authorities are acutely aware of as it comes up regularly at all their meetings. I sit on the joint policing committee in South Dublin County Council's administrative area. At every meeting, this issue is top of the agenda as the most problematic to deal with, and the problem is not getting any better. Local authorities take as many preventative steps as they can to deal with this problem in terms of boundary treatments of parks, kissing gates and so forth but, inevitably, regardless of the physical actions and engineering solutions they try to implement, they do not achieve the target. They are vandalised, broken down, rammed and so on, and the problem persists. When one attends a joint policing committee, it is interesting to see that everybody is singing off the same hymn sheet in terms of this problem. A legislative solution to it has to be found. The building out and engineering solutions are not working.

Sinn Féin talks about the parks, but this is not just a problem in parks and open spaces. It is also a problem on the roads in our housing estates, in shopping centre car-----

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