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

I commend the Minister of State on her very thoughtful words, as ever, and I thank her for sharing her time. I also commend the committee on publishing this very important and thorough report.

Some years ago, I travelled with my partner to the Netherlands. In the historic city of Nijmegen, we stayed in the home of a Dutch man who kindly rented us the spare room in his apartment. The man was quadriplegic and the apartment had been carefully designed to meet his needs. In the developed world we recognise the importance of universal access, underpinned by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, by having building design standards that ensure that people with disabilities can live their lives freely and independently. It is a fundamental right, and in our building design codes we have acted to ensure that this right is protected.

After leaving Nijmegen, we cycled from city to city and across beautiful countryside. Sometimes we took trains, but mostly we cycled. We were young and fit, but we were also able bodied, and I was more aware than ever in my life how much of a privilege that is. As we travelled, newly appreciative of the challenges of people with disabilities, I noticed on the streets of Dutch towns and cities more and more people who, whether through illness, age or other reasons, did not have the same privilege that myself and my partner had. These were people of all ages and genders with all kinds of mobility aids - trikes, wheelchairs, adapted bikes and so on.

With its excellent infrastructure, the Netherlands is a good country for cycling, but after a few days there it became clear that it is wrong to characterise the Dutch approach as simply to prioritise cycling. The truth is that they have designed and built mobility networks for everybody, for people of all ages, genders and, critically, abilities.

On returning to Ireland, I did not see so many people with disabilities and I wondered why that was the case. Is there a lower incidence of people with disabilities in Ireland? No, that is not true. What is true, sadly, is that by not designing and building safe and coherent mobility networks, we have locked people in their homes. As a State, historically, we have been neglectful of the needs of so many of our citizens because, while we may have designed universal access into our building codes, we have simply not done so with respect to our roads and streets. We have prioritised the needs of the wealthy and the able-bodied over everyone else. It is not an exaggeration to say that we have treated a cohort of our population as second-class citizens and we should be utterly ashamed.

The design manual for roads and streets is an important guide; indeed, it is mandatory guidance. However, many of our local authorities wilfully ignore it when carrying out physical interventions in respect of our streets. This is unacceptable and I call on the Ministers, Deputies Eamon Ryan and Darragh O’Brien, to restate to local authorities that compliance is not a choice. I would welcome further regulation to ensure that local authorities, in all of their functions, are required to adhere to this manual.

The Government is stepping up and providing unprecedented funding for active travel infrastructure, more than almost any other country in the world. We need our institutions of State to spend this money properly and to ensure, as quickly as possible, that we develop the mobility networks that are so critical to the well-being and independence of so many of our people.

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