I will confine my comments today to the issue of road safety around schools and enabling children to access schools in a safer manner. I welcome, as part of that, the implementation of phase 2 of the national speed limit review, which proposes to reduce the speed limit in urban areas to a default of 30 km/h. It is not so clear, however, what is expected of local authorities in relation to schools on national routes, and we should give them greater clarity. The Minister of State will be very familiar with some of the routes I am going to discuss, such as the R336 and the N59. In the case of the N59, Scoil Baile Nua, Rosscahill national school, Leam national school and Derryglinna are all on a national route. We should provide direct guidance to Galway County Council and other local authorities that we expect the speed limit, at least periodically around the time of school operations, to be reduced to 30 km/h at those spots. Similarly, on the R336, at Scoil Náisiúnta na bhForbacha, Scoil Náisiúnta Sailearna and scoil An Tulach, we should also ensure that at those locations the county council will reduce the speed limit to 30 km/h. On a general point, across the country, while we welcome the work local authorities are doing specifically on urban areas, we should ask them to reduce the speed limit on those national regional routes to 30 km/h during school times at least. I also want to talk about the safe routes to school scheme. We all welcome the ambition and objective of that scheme to make it easier for children to walk, cycle or scoot to school. A level of frustration has developed around the completion of those projects. I was the principal of a school that was involved in the first tranche of the safe routes to school scheme and, as yet, the work has not been completed. One of the challenges is that money is being provided to the active travel team within the local authorities but they also have lots of other tasks to do such as maintaining bus shelters, cycle schemes and road-narrowing schemes. We should provide the local authorities with staff specific to the safe routes to school scheme. The investment deserves that.

Sentiment score: 0.28