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

There is money in cycling tourism. I know it. I spent 15 years in our family business, which my sister and her husband still run and which is involved in cycling tourism.

I have to declare that background. One of the attractive things about cycling tourism is that it tends to slow people in a region down. Some of the places people want to go cycling in are the more out of the way places so this disperses funding down to the local level of bed and breakfast accommodation and local pubs, restaurants and shops. It is a good form of tourism and it is low impact in a range of different ways.

My experience in this is in international marketing. I am a former chairman of the walking cycling Ireland business group, a national organisation. It is brilliant that we have these routes connecting up to become part of an extended network because we can go to Germany or America and say we have these high quality routes. This is not just greenway routes as there will be other areas where we will not have a rail line or a completely segregated route. There are good areas for cycling where we can use our existing road network. This could be part of some of the routes we are suggesting. The Ballaghbeama Gap through the centre of the Iveragh Peninsula is a stunning road which is not dangerous to cycle. The volume of traffic is low and there is a good line of sight. I have brought thousands of people on some of those back roads. In my experience of cycling around the Beara Peninsula, which is the next peninsula down from Iveragh, this could be done without necessarily always having segregated routes. We have to start thinking about this type of tourism as a major part of our tourism potential, which it is and people know that in the area. When I am cycling on a road and I receive a one-finger signal from a driver to say hello, I always take that as an indication that the road is safe enough to cycle on because people can see each other, the speeds are not so fast and there is a culture of connection and respect. We have that across rural Ireland but particularly in Cork and Kerry in my experience.

While these projects are for tourism, particularly in areas such as Kerry, they are also local infrastructure for local people. They are there to make it easy for a local child to get to school or for a local person to get to the shops, to work or to use in an everyday way. They are not disconnected from local use and must be for local use first and foremost in my view. My understanding is that the difficulty with the section from Reenard Point to Valentia and back to Cahersiveen relates to coastal erosion. It was not a planning difficulty or a compulsory purchase order problem. The alternative is for us to provide infrastructure in the fine and stunning town of Cahersiveen that enhances the town and makes it easier for local people to get a good public realm and a well-designed main street. We should use this as a mechanism to reimagine Cahersiveen. I mention what we have done in Clonakilty with the good public realm there. Let us do that in Cahersiveen at the same time as we put the greenway through. That would turn the town around and make it a tourism Mecca.

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