Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister. One of the small silver linings of Covid - and, let us be frank, there have very have been very few of them - has been people returning to rural Ireland and the vibrancy we are once again seeing in our villages. To take as an example Kilkee in County Clare, my party colleague, Councillor Cillian Murphy, has often bemoaned the fact that only one in three people in Kilkee are permanent residents. People go during heatwaves in the nine or ten days we typically get in an Irish summer and they are gone again. People are back living in Kilkee. They are job hunting and house hunting. This is leading to other problems but for tonight we can say the national development plan is injecting huge amounts of money and hope into rural Ireland. I want to briefly reference a number of issues. The progressing of the Killaloe bypass in Clare is good. The light rail system proposed from Limerick city to Shannon and Bunratty is very welcome. Are there timeframes for these projects? I worry somewhat that while they are backed and contained in the national development plan, some of the planning logistics could make them a little bit further down the line than we would like. We need some streamlining of the process.

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