Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I raise the issue of safety on our rural roads because another family has suffered an unbearable loss this week. Another innocent life has been taken, that of Aoibheann Duffy, an 11-year-old girl from County Kerry who was out for a cycle on a summer evening near her home. We have failed this young girl and her family. We have failed in our duty of care towards people living in rural areas. We have failed because we are willing to tolerate roads that are simply no longer safe for the people living along them.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is only in the past 20 or 30 years that our rural roads have become the sole preserve of the car, van and truck. Before that, our roadways were shared and people could, and did, walk and cycle safely on them. Vehicles have got bigger and faster and roads have been widened and designed for speed to the extent that many families are locked inside their front gates, unable to go anywhere unless they do so by car. We have made people in rural Ireland more dependent than ever on cars, with all the dire health and social impacts that go with that. In our towns and cities, we have rightly adopted a hierarchy of road users when we design roads. This hierarchy states that we must satisfy the needs of the most vulnerable first. The order of priority goes from the most vulnerable road user to the least vulnerable. In rural Ireland, perversely, we have, in effect, inversed that hierarchy and it is the fast, powerful vehicle that dominates.

I know the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, has a commitment to active travel and to the health and environmental benefits that travelling under one's own steam brings. He and his colleagues, the Minister for Transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan, and the Minister of State, Deputy Naughton, have been starting a revolution in active travel, with unprecedented investment in walking and cycling infrastructure, safe routes to schools and greenways in rural areas. We need to give more attention to our rural roads. Cycling and walking are not solely urban activities. We must afford everyone the opportunity to get the exercise they need to stay healthy. In addition, not everyone wants to, or can, use a car for all their daily mobility needs. Making our rural roads safer to walk and cycle on is the fair and right thing to do for our environment, our health and our society.

We can do more to stop families from experiencing the preventable death of a child on the roads. I want to extend my sympathies to the Duffy family in Kerry and, indeed, to all the families who have lost loved ones in road accidents. One of my own family members was killed by a driver while cycling and I know the hurt and pain of such a loss can persist for decades. In the Netherlands, an active travel revolution was started in the 1970s with the call to "Stop de Kindermoord", which means "stop the child murder". This past year has demonstrated the capacity of the State to act to prevent premature deaths from the coronavirus pandemic. We have stayed at home, worn masks and kept our distance. We do not have to shut down our economy to prevent children from dying on the roads of rural Ireland. We just need to stop, think of the unbearable grief suffered by families and demonstrate the same capacity for action to prevent the premature deaths of children in road accidents.

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