Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I very much welcome the Minister's hands-on and positive approach. He has mentioned various things. Galway County Council has consistently and continuously told us that it is underfunded. It sets out the parameters under which it gets its funding, and it is underfunded. It is one of the most underfunded local authorities. This is on record with the Minister's Department. There have been many meetings on this issue. The city council is slightly better, but not much.

On active travel, it is oversubscribed all the time. People want active travel. For example, this week there was a second protest out in Bearna. That is tangential to the issue we are discussing but it is in the same area. They had to go out and protest two weeks in a row because of a failure of the safe schools route. The ones that were opened up by the Government going back over time are oversubscribed. There are phases 1, 2 and 3 and, in the meantime, they are taking their safety in their own hands. These are children attending school. I am not exaggerating. People do not protest two weeks in a row at 8 o'clock in the morning, desperately drawing the attention of the county council to the danger, for no reason. Of course, the safe routes to school programme run by An Taisce is brilliant but there is not enough money or resources within the county council to implement the schemes when the NTA, working with An Taisce, brings the schemes up.

I will go back to the issue at hand. It is a wonderful idea but the delay so far has been unacceptable. The council cannot deliver on this. I know this from talking to its representatives on the ground. They do not have the resources in the climate action regional offices, CAROs. The Minister referred to millions of euros. I have a figure of €7.9 million and he has a figure of €9 million. When that is spread out between all of the local authorities it comes to zilch, really. Crucial to this is independent monitoring of the progress with regard to the 7% reduction, and a tolerance to allow local authorities to come forward to tell the Minister they simply cannot do this wonderful thing because they do not have enough money. That atmosphere has to be created where they can come forward.

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