I will speak today on greenways. As someone who has been working in the area of sustainable travel for many years and campaigning and writing letters endlessly seeking money for such things, I am very happy with yesterday's announcement of funding. I could not let this opportunity go without speaking on this development. Some people think of greenways as a place where people go for a bit of a cycle or just where tourists go. A greenway is far more than that, however. It is the very tool that is missing in rural Ireland to restitch the fabric of communities. I have visited all the existing greenways, located in the midlands and counties Waterford, Kerry, Limerick and Mayo several times. I wish for the day to come when we will have them all over Ireland and this is a good step in that direction.

This will create thousands of jobs and bring the instant revival of villages and towns. On any greenway one might visit, it is possible to see once-derelict villages now thriving. Kilmacthomas was dead but now it has no derelict buildings and 30 people are working in the local café. This is what can happen when people work together, including landowners, engineers, community groups and businesses. When they come together, success is golden. More than 2,000 people use the Waterford greenway every day. The value of this type of tourism is evident because people who come on a bike spend four times more money than someone who comes in a car and at least 20 times more than people who come down on buses.

It also spreads out the benefits to the wider area. In County Clare, for instance, 1.2 million visitors could be coming to the Cliffs of Moher, while Miltown Malbay, Corofin and Kilfenora may be struggling. That is not the case, however, with a greenway, where every town and village along the route benefits. In addition, research from Mayo and Waterford shows that people will look for accommodation up to 60 km away from a greenway and that spreads the benefits around. Even if an area is not directly on the greenway, therefore, there will still be great opportunities for areas anywhere close to it.

I wrote an amendment to the Green Party policy on rural development and it is called a farmers first policy. That is key to the success of greenways. We must ensure that we work with landowners. Greenways do not have to stick to the straight lines of the old railways. It is always good to have a bit of meandering and the first people that need to be engaged with in that context are the farmers. We must ensure that they will have full indemnity and proper fencing, and then farmers will see the benefits that will accrue to them from greenways, including keeping young people on the farms. That is very important for us in rural Ireland.

I support the call for the creation of a select committee on Brexit because I think that is an important issue. My colleague spoke about the education issues which we need to look at. From the perspective of agriculture, we need some idea about how Brexit, especially in its later stages, could have a major impact on the agriculture industry.

I spoke yesterday about local government and the need for reform. I was amazed by the response. I got many calls specifically regarding what is happening with our recycling and bring centres and the lack of joined-up thinking in this regard. I referred yesterday to the lack of town councils having a major effect on how our communities are working, as we do not have local input from town councils on local issues. I heard reports this morning that a civic amenity site in Bandon had closed because of a lack of staffing. A bring site also relocated out of Bandon because of dumping and another similar site relocated out of Dunmanway for the same reason.

We need a more local focus on what is happening on the ground. We have moved big government into local government issues, so we do not have that local focus. We must go back, therefore, to one of the models that worked, and that was town councils. Regarding bring sites, our attitude seems to be that we will state there is an issue with dumping and then close the sites in response. That is totally inappropriate.

We now have a staycations policy, with many people coming to west Cork and yet we are closing our bring sites. That is not good news for Ireland or local government, and that is not how we should be doing things. We need to find solutions, rather than just taking the easy option by closing bring sites and walking away because of the minority having a major effect on the majority. This debate, therefore, regarding local government and reform of local government is an important one. It is amazing how much society has changed in the past six months. People now want to have a real input into what happens in their local community and they want local power brought back to local communities.