Mr. Andrew Murphy:

I thank Senator O'Reilly. It is ten years since I left Galway but when I last lived there, the outer bypass was a major issue and it is still being debated. I remember reading the impact assessment for the proposed bypass ten years ago. The evidence then was pretty clear that building the road would cause more cars to be used in Galway and would make the city more car dependent. Is our vision to have electric buses stuck in traffic behind electric cars? That is what we will get if we pursue both the electrification of vehicles and the construction of more roads. When we talk about the electrification of cars, we always talk about Norway and how great it is but we should look at what Oslo is doing. Oslo as a city is being very aggressive in getting cars out of the city. It has been closing streets to cars and removing on-street car parking. Supporting the electrification of vehicles is not the same as supporting endless road building.

To touch on the mineral issues which were raised by Deputy Whitmore, there is a problem with the minerals used in battery production. Last December the EU proposed the world's first law to regulate the mineral content of batteries, including enforcing social conditions for extraction and recycling targets for some of those minerals. Obviously, the more vehicles we have to produce, the more challenging it is to ensure that production is done sustainably. We should electrify as much as we can but we must focus on the electrification element and not the road building part.