Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ceann Comhairle for accommodating me. I welcome the publication of the town centre first policy. Like most of the Members who have spoken this afternoon, I look forward to its implementation. The policy is a good idea. It looks good on paper. I would like to see it in action in our towns and villages.

I was somewhat disturbed by the recent remark by the Tánaiste that retail has changed and people are shopping online. He appeared to give up on retail. We need to get behind saving retail jobs. For that reason, I would ask the Minister of State, Deputy Burke, to consider engaging with the Mandate trade union and its proposed forum on the future of retail. As an Oireachtas, we need to fight for those jobs and to make them decent jobs. Let us not give up on retail. Let us make our town centres the type of places in which people want to live and spend time and, for those who have money, where they want to shop and spend some of it.

On the concept of making our town centres accessible for everyone, we need to look at this in the round. In recent times, we have had many discussions in this Chamber in regard to making our streets safe for women. Our town centres have to work and they have to be accessible for people with disabilities and accessible and safe for women, families and older people. They have to be places where everyone in the community wants to be. Towns and villages in my own area such as Rush, Lusk, Skerries, Malahide, Portmarnock, Balbriggan and Swords are wonderfully vibrant towns with fantastic young populations. We want to see our towns and villages thriving. These towns are crying out for remote working hubs. While the legislation around that did not get off to a great start, we are working to make it fit for purpose and to ensure the remote working hubs, when established, are accessible to all workers. This means they cannot be too expensive if they are to accommodate all workers.

The multi-stakeholder town teams are a very good idea. On Monday last, I attended a networking event organised by Dr. Lucy Michael as part of She Leads - We Lead, Fingal. This is a group that is working with women who are marginalised but are active in their communities and want to step up that activity. I urge the Minister of State, when putting together those teams, to look to organisations and initiatives such as She Leads - We Lead, Fingal and similar organisations in other areas to ensure we take in everybody and not just the people we would traditionally think would be involved. We need to bring in all voices, in particular marginalised voices, to ensure we are all working together to make our town centres better.

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