Dr. Brian Caulfield:

I thank the Senator for an interesting question. On the question of how we bring people with us, it is all around behaviour change. Behavioural change takes time. We have eight and a half years to do this. It took 13 years to reduce car usage coming into the canals in Dublin by 11% so this is going to take time to do. As I said earlier, we are asking people to throw the kitchen sink at it and asking people to do everything at once. As the committee will be aware, it is not just in transport but in agriculture, energy and every other space.

On the taxi example, I am not sure about the one in Copenhagen the Senator was talking about as I am not aware of it. The issues around the taxi uptake in Ireland relate to the models drivers have had to adapt and use. Taxi drivers are the same as us when we think about an EV. They are wondering what the range is, how many trips might they lose on charging, where the chargers are located and how much dwell time they will have around charging. Those are the kind of things we must look at there.

On hydrogen, the Senator is correct that the bang for buck is to be found with heavy goods vehicles. However, we must start to look at it for heavy rail as well. There are definitely possibilities there. I would like a study to be done on the comparison of the electrification of our rail network compared to using hydrogen. There are great examples from Scandinavia where they have managed to do this and there is a huge amount of potential there.