Myself and Deputy Peadar Tóibín have two minutes.

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Yes.

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The Deputy still has 40 seconds left.

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Once again, we have the delays with the Courts and Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2025. Obviously, I welcome the temporary legislation. We spoke about it last May. I wish to focus on a couple of slightly left-of-centre things we could do alongside that legislation. In Rjukan, Norway, a mirror was put on the mountains because no sun shone on the town in the winter as a result of the mountains. Through innovation, there is now sunlight in the town square. There are a lot of towns and villages in this country that have some form of a square or street and we should be giving grants to ensure that these streets can be covered to protect them from both sunlight in the summer as well as rainfall, which happens often in this country. If we want to get people sitting outside, it is one thing allowing for seating – and I welcome the legislation to allow people to sit outside restaurants and bars on public streets to socialise – but when a heavy shower comes along, it drives people indoors very quickly. There are a lot of places. To provide an example in Ireland, there is a small, covered area in Castlebar, but I refer to something three or four times that size. For example, Strokestown was a designed town and it has a large square area which could be used for a market or seating area to revitalise the town. In our city and town centres, such as those in Cork, Killarney and Dublin, there is scope to cover major streets and encourage an outdoor night-time culture, not so much café culture, although we need more night-time cafés as well. I agree with the previous speaker, Deputy Tóibín, in trying to encourage people to go to the pubs and socialise there. That is also about providing refurbishment grants to pubs. Obviously, there are people coming for the tradition and the music but there are types of pubs where people want to go out and play different games, such as pool, table tennis, cards and different things like that. Pubs have become more multi-use spaces and if they need to re-assess their area for usage, grants available or rates rebates should be available in that regard.

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