Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Dooley asked about climate change. Our Department is the lead Department on climate action. However, some aspects are directly within my competency as Minister - on the electricity side, on the energy side, and on buildings and energy efficiency. They come under my remit. Agriculture and transport do not come under my remit. We work quite closely and there is a Cabinet sub-committee that works on this. When Commissioner Arias Cañete was here in May, representatives from the Departments of Agriculture, Food and Marine, Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Transport, Tourism and Sport attended those meetings. We liaise very closely with those Departments, as we do with the Department of the Taoiseach on this. The Department of the Taoiseach has taken an overarching supervisory role in this for many years prior to my appointment as Minister with responsibility for climate action.

In November we will publish the draft climate mitigation plan. We will appear before this committee to get its view on it. That will cover the issues across the various areas, including agriculture, transport, the built environment and energy. It will explore the options available to us, costs and how we can monitor progress. We expect to finalise that by the middle of next year. We have engaged with the other Departments on this and further engagement will take place. This committee can play a great role feeding into that. I want the committee's input into all these things. It is important that that is reflected in the final document. It is very much a working document. We are here to hear the committee's views on it.

Coming back to Deputy Dooley's points about transport, it is not just about taxes, which on their own will not make a difference; it is important for people to have alternatives. Deputy Dooley and others mentioned electric vehicles. We expect to have a task force on electric vehicles established by the end of October. We had all expected electric vehicles to have had a far greater uptake at this stage than they have had. The difficulty is that while it has benefited our economy, it has not benefited our environment in that carbon-based products have come down in price in recent years. Therefore it has not driven the movement to electric vehicles. We need to look at this again.

It comes back to what Senator O'Reilly said. We cannot just look at electric vehicles, but need to move people along that road through the use of VRT, motor tax and so forth. I suspect that as part of the discussion on electric vehicles between our Department and the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport we will investigate other options. I intend to speak specifically about that issue at next week's OECD climate conference in Paris. I will outline some ideas we have and where we could get assistance across the OECD. The Deputy suggested looking at the Scandinavian examples. There is no point in us trying to reinvent the wheel here. I would like to explore allowing electric vehicles to use bus lanes.

It may be a way to incentivise and encourage people to transfer to electric vehicles. The other problem with them for everybody other than Deputy Smith is the distance they can travel.