Senator Gerard Craughwell - speech from 20 Nov 2019

Minister, welcome to the House, it's a privilege to address you today on the issue of sports grants and also transport. Can I say at the outset I want to discuss sport and the grant system? I agree totally with my colleague Senator Boyan and I know your opposition to people making political gain or political appointments or anything like that and while it might be at odds with my position on the judicial appointments Bill, I believe that you have an opportunity as Minister now to take politics out of sports grants and stop the nonsense that we see of people making mileage. As Senator Boyan said nobody got a grant for anybody. Grants are given on the basis of an application by your officials. Now do I hit the floor or don't I? The bottom line on it is people apply for grants, your officials assess those grants in an open and transparent way and they are made accordingly. So let's stop the nonsense of I got a grant for you or we worked to get you a grant. Minister, you're the only one that should be seen when it comes to grants being handed out. You are the ones that you are the ones that come after you. Now, Minister, over the last few days I have taken to the bicycle following a challenge here in Dublin City. I'd invite you actually to do the same thing because you learn some serious things as you cycle around Dublin. I first want to thank I bike Dublin, Ciaran Ferry and Oshin O'Connor for their assistance in accompanying me around the city. Minister, it is incredible that we have cycleways that go a couple of hundred yards and then disappear. We have cycleways down along the quays, for example, that you share with bus lanes while the cars are flying past you on the right-hand lane. People have discussed transport in Dublin and I think in fairness to you, you have extended the length of the Lewis lines, you're improving the dart. I think the time has come to put a congestion charge in Dublin and remove traffic, as much traffic as we can from the streets in Dublin. Public transport is good in this city, very, very good. Going back to the issue of cycling. Cycling around Dublin, particularly when you get down past Westland Road, you have a contraway for cyclists to get down onto City Quay. On City Quay there, there is a cycleway. It is fantastic. I can tell you, as a very novice cyclist coming along there, I felt so safe. I was well away from the traffic. It was a great piece of work. I think there's an opportunity to put a cycleway from Black Rock, for example, or from Dun Laoghaire straight into the city centre. We can do so much for cycling around the city. One of the things I'd ask you to consider, Minister, is at traffic lights. I never knew and never thought about it until I was on a bicycle myself. Commercial drivers, bus drivers and taxi drivers tend to be a bit sympathetic. But when you're at traffic lights on a bicycle and the lights turn green, for some reason or other, people in their cars feel they have to compete with you for a takeoff to see if they can beat you to the takeoff. And I wonder, would you consider putting in a second set of traffic lights or a secondary set of traffic lights that would turn green for cyclists and allow them to take off with safety maybe a minute before the lights turn green for cars. I think that would make for very safe cycling around the city. The other one that I have a difficulty with is the delivery vans parked in cycleways. So you have a cycleway. The local authority has put in a cycleway, say down along Dame Street. But as you're cycling down along Dame Street, you find trucks parked on the left hand side of the road and you have to move out onto the carriageway competing with cars in order to pass those trucks. I don't know how we'll get over the issue other than to have deliveries between say seven in the morning and nine in the morning or something like that. I have to compliment you for the rules you brought in, although initially when I heard it, I was a bit horrified that you have to be a certain distance from a cyclist overtaking them. But having climbed up on a bicycle, I can see the need for it. Certainly, as a cyclist, you need to feel that you're not going to have cars coming right up your side. We cycled up Kildare Street here the other day and we had a van come up behind us and he revved his engine no end. He couldn't have passed us if he wanted to because the carriageway is narrow enough and you have the carriageway divided now because there's a contraflow on it with buses. But this guy constantly revved his car or his truck trying to intimidate us in order that we'd stop cycling, get off the bike, get on the footpath and let him pass. So, I think cyclists suffer a lot travelling around this city. I'm no cheerleader for them, they have enough cheerleaders themselves and indeed some of the people that speak for cyclists need to cop themselves on and try and do it in a more controlled way. But I believe looking at the city here in the morning from about 7.30 until about 9.30, there are thousands of bicycles that come through this city every day. The rent a bicycle system that there is in the city allows people to get across the city very easy. So, I've got to compliment the department that has put a lot of these things in place or facilitated local authorities for putting them in place. But what I am asking now, Minister, is that your department sit down and actually, I think today we heard there's a small number of people in the department dedicated to cycling. I wonder, could we get a couple of really proactive people involved who would get out on a bicycle themselves, note the situation around the town. It is crazy, for example, when you cycle down that contraflow beyond West Llanro, once you cross Pierce Street Station and you're heading down to City Quay, you're cycling along a nice cycleway and suddenly it ends. It's just gone. Then you come up to O'Connell Bridge and you're crossing O'Connell Bridge heading down the quays and there's a cycleway there for about 100 yards and then it's gone. And you're now into a joint bus lane and cycle lane and that I think is certainly not the best way to do things. So I think we need to sit down and look at bicycles as a motor transport, they're clean, they're healthy. I'm thinking of taking up a little bit more cycling and I've undertaken to cycle in Galway and I will do it in Limerick, I'll do it in Cork and I will do it in Waterford. Although I have some reservations about Cork. Thank you. But at the end of the day, I think we need officials to go out there and see what's going on on the ground. I would like you to look at cycling and how we would support cyclists in the city to make it a cleaner, greener, safer environment for all of us. And I know that you're always keen to engage with people. There was an engagement today in the committee with the bicycle people, iBiker Dublin were down there. So I would like to see maybe that you'd sit down with a small group of those who are calm and have reasonable arguments to make, listen to what they have to say and see how we might improve things. I do appreciate local authorities have a role here as well and from that point of view I would ask the local authorities to do similar. Listen to what people need and see what we can provide for them. There's some great work being done around the place. I'll leave it at that.