Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Spratt and thank him for the work he does on behalf of us all. To broaden the debate a little, when it comes to climate change there is pretty widespread acceptance that it is an important feature of life and will be important moving into the future. While people have bought into the concept of climate change and the necessity to change, most believe somebody else's area needs to change first. The transport sector believes it should be somebody else carrying the pain and it is the same with agriculture. There is a dilemma. Where I see the difficulty with the work ahead of transport is the urban-rural divide. I am just flagging some of the issues; I do not have the solutions. Further investment in infrastructure in densely populated areas will get a significant return on investment. It becomes far more difficult in rural areas, such as the ones I know best. It has been suggested that changing the planning rules or regulations will solve the problem but it is not going to do it by 2030 or 2050 because many of these areas are already settled communities. While Local Link is a good service, it is not used to the extent that it could be or is resourced to. We see Local Link services all over the country with relatively poor uptake. They play an important role for some young people, people with disabilities and certain marginalised members within communities. That is a test of public transport in rural areas and the people behind it are doing well but it is not getting the kind of uptake that would have any meaningful impact on reducing individual vehicular traffic on the roads. I am not suggesting that Mr. Spratt is taking a one-size-fits-all approach but instead of attempting to use public transport as a system to solve all our problems would we be better off trying to encourage a greater use of electric vehicles in those regions? Should we skew the supports for electric vehicles to areas other than the city? When we started off talking about electric cars, Mr. Spratt always said the run-around car, the second car in the home that does 8,000 km to 10,000 km a year, could be electric because of the range. Should our efforts be focused on looking at those electric vehicles with a broader spread of population and give special targeted supports there?

Have we looked at the emergence of hydrogen or are we looking at it at all? The ESB has identified hydrogen as a method of storage of energy. Part of its ten-year plan is to capture a lot of wind energy off the Atlantic Ocean and use that energy at a time the demand is not great on the grid. It will develop or create green hydrogen, store it and use it at a later stage. There is a lot of talk around the world about the use of hydrogen as a liquid fuel for the future. Are we playing a part in that or looking at it? Heavy goods vehicles, for example, are big burners of diesel. They are significant contributors to our emissions. The road haulage people provide good information. The latest trucks are quite compliant and they have reduced their emissions in a big way but that has to go to the next stage. Is that hydrogen? We met with Bus Éireann recently, which is testing three buses in this space.

I am a little concerned that when we talk about modal shift and the necessity of looking at the way we travel, a lot of focus is on public transport, walking and cycling. While that is wonderful, it misses to some extent the issues from a rural perspective. BusConnects will get a considerable measure of activity within urban areas and we can put in more rail or light rail in some of the smaller cities. That will work but in villages that are satellites to county towns enough buses cannot be put on the road to resolve the complexity of people's transport needs. I live in a village in east Clare, in a development of 50 houses, and each of the two people in most of the houses goes in every direction, from Tipperary to Galway to Cork to Ennis to Shannon, every day. The Department is not going to be able to provide a bus service to Tulla that will meet the complex needs of the way people have chosen to base themselves in rural Ireland. Close to a big city running a bus from Rathfarnham into the city centre, getting the frequency and the connections right will cover 90% of the demand. It is a different issue in rural areas and people there get concerned when they hear the stick of trying to get cars off the road because they recognise that there is not an obvious mix. It is not cycling, walking or e-scooters and it is not buses. That is just my tuppence ha'penny on that.