Ciarán Cannon

You feel completely safe in there.

If you come in from Clontarf, that wonderful new development of cycle away from Clontarf into the city centre, you feel really safe.

So we're making progress, but we need to be absolutely determined in not relenting and keeping going until we get there.

Okay, so we have 750 kilometres of greenway now in Ireland, which serve, to be honest, Matt, serve two functions.

They serve the function of, you know, attracting tourists to perhaps areas that haven't seen tourists before.

And we've seen the wonderful success of that in Mayo and Waterford and Kerry and other places.

But they also serve and increasingly serve as safe routes to school for children, safe routes to school for people who are commuting in and out of our rural towns.

And then the remainder then is that 1,250 kilometres of segregated cycleway in our towns and cities.

But let's just look at the weather for a moment because this is a bit of a

an issue that seems to crop up every now and again yeah ireland it rains okay but uh you know if you look at places again amsterdam for example has very similar number of rainy days per year to dublin um and the dutch didn't set out to solve the weather they set out to solve their roads problems and you look at places like finland finland gets incredibly dark

and incredibly cold and incredibly dreary in the winter, yet they have a multiple of our children cycling to school every single day.

So nobody says that weather prevents kids in Ireland from playing GAA or soccer or that it somehow makes outdoor life impossible.

But what does happen with the weather, Matt?

when you're looking at unsafe routes to work and school, it is that final tipping point where people say, well, I don't feel safe out there already, but if it rains, I'm definitely not going.

Okay, and that's the issue.

And I'll give you one final piece of really... Quickly, because I want to bring Conor in.

Dublin City Council just last year did a survey.

They have a counter on that Clontarf cycleway, which counts many cyclists pass by every day.

They compared that count with rainfall data to see would heavy rainfall deter people from using that piece of infrastructure?

And they found, surprisingly to some, that it didn't.