Conor D McGuinness: Rural transport failures strand communities

Deputy Conor McGuinness. Margaret, Cathaoirleach, and thanks for this engagement. I think it's really useful. I've been taking notes and apologies I had to go speak in the Dáil earlier. First questions for Mr. Smith and Irish Rural Inc. It boils down to a lot of the challenges facing rural Ireland. I think the housing piece, and we might as a committee come back to that at another meeting, housing and planning, but also connection. And I see it as incorporating the issue of access to public services, the issue of isolation and loneliness, but also the issue of transport. And transport is key to accessing those services, especially when they're becoming more concentrated in towns, and also building connection and tackling isolation. And I want to give one example, and there's a group here from Grange and County Waterford, and Councillor Kato Mahony is accompanying them, where Bus Éireann have removed a bus stop in a fairly substantially populated rural area because of a lack of roads investment. Because of a lack of investment in the N25, because the road has not had safely upgraded and has become unsafe, and that has had knock on impacts. So this is a semi-state body engaging with TII and Waterford City and County Council that has had to pull a service off an intercity route, and no substitute has been made there, and Local Link have been approached and they're looking at what they can do. But there will be no new routes, we're told, in the Local Link space this year and potentially next year. So this community is left high and dry. People, younger people, accessing training, apprenticeships, school or public services themselves, older people who are trying to maintain that connection with their society and their community, all left high and dry, or forced into cars, forced, if they don't have a car themselves, to go to neighbours. I just think it's something that needs to be highlighted, and it summed up for me the problem there in terms of connection. You mentioned, in terms of Local Link, and I have to say I totally agree with you, where if it was, I suppose, empowered on a national level to make its own decisions and not have to go to the NTA on every single occasion to look for permission to launch a route, to tailor a route. But sometimes the flow goes the other way, where the NTA effectively say jump, and the local group has to say, well, how high would you like us to jump? And that's a backwards way of working things. So I think that demand is really clearly visible on the ground, and one that I would like to support. And it would, I would imagine, be fairly cost neutral for the state. It's one I would imagine that the ministers should really look at, and it's one I'll be bringing back to them following this meeting. I do have a question in terms of the isolation piece, and we see, we had a discussion here today about looking at rural pubs, for example, and other rural businesses. If you were designing a meeting of this committee to look at that issue around isolation, who do you think should be around the table as witnesses? And you're not able to get up on a bus, or nobody is down there to help you. It can be very isolating. And to answer your question, I think this has to be a multi-agency task force, in effect, to try and see what we can do. Because, you know, even things like Meals on Wheels, and I just keep coming back to it, and talking about Deputy Gallagher who spoke about the LIS thing, and indeed John Nahia spoke about the availability of cars for Meals on Wheels. If you don't have the ability to get to the transports, to get people out of the area, then what happens is that you have to ensure that the services that are required to go to them are there. But they're not. They are missing. One of the things about Irish Rural Link is that we're often conflated with Local Link. So most of my calls, probably one out of every two, is about the Local Link services, and asking me to try and do something about that. And often when speaking with the transport managers, what I've found is that they're afraid to change existing services that could be changed to adapt to local needs. Because the NTA, if they see the things that potentially haven't been looked at in 20 years, for people that were in potential daycare or other elements, that they're afraid to change it, because if they change it, they may lose the funding. I think you're right, we may not see any increase this year, and I think we may not even see any increase next year from having discussions with them. We've been advocating for changes in, for instance, in Cooling County, Westmead, it's an IPAS centre, there's people that just can't afford to get out, they've lost their local shop, they've lost their local medical centre. The cost there now is being borne by having to pay for taxis. Taxis to get 15 to 20 kilometres, so it's not small money. So it's an all-agency response on that, to try and address that. And connectivity, you know, it's alright talking about digital connectivity and taking Deputy Gallagher's point on the sky, but nobody out of the older cohort is sufficiently versed to, you know, go onto a Teams meeting and say, you know, go onto a Teams meeting with the person down the road. One of the things I want to do highlight is that there was a community, a series of community centres down in Kerry there recently, and the GAA Go element, what they did was they brought in people from the local area, not necessarily to bring them for a drink, but to bring them in to allow them to sit in the community centre to watch the local match. So to try and address that loneliness. And the things like the GAA social initiative, there's various other initiatives that are out there, but it's transport, transport, transport. You talk about climate resilience, climate adaption. Put a bus outside somebody's door and let them use them. Let them use them to go to the pubs. And we see the advantage of that all across rural Ireland. I see it across County Waterford where Local Link has made great strides over the last number of years and has really allowed people to travel around in their own county, to go to other towns and villages, to expand their social lives, to access training and all the rest of it. Thanks for that. I have a question for Miss Aylward. I listened with interest to you talking about transport, to stick with the theme. There is absolutely a need, and I totally agree with you, to see significant investment in the N24. It's important for Tipperary, but also for Kilkenny and for my own constituency of Waterford. It's really disappointing that it wasn't provided with funding in the last round for urgent upgrades. I would also include the N25 in that, and the R671 that connects Dungarvan with Clann Mellon is an important transport route for both Waterford and Tipperary. The N25 and the N24 are dangerous stretches of road. I think the N25 has the dubious honour of being the most dangerous stretch of national primary route, and the N24 is not far behind it, both critically important to the regional economy in the south-east, both critically important to counties Tipperary and County Waterford. I think in this forum I just want to reiterate the call for urgent safety upgrades, urgent capacity upgrades as well, because if we're talking about rural Ireland and regional balance and regional equity, if we don't have the transport infrastructure to underscore that, to facilitate that growth, to facilitate that diversification, to facilitate primary producers and manufacturers getting their products to market, we're on a hiding to nothing, to put it very bluntly. Thank you.