Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will try to address the Senator's points as best I can and discuss the specifics of the different areas but I do not have knowledge of everything because we have so many projects. On Galway, I agree with the Senator about the cross-city link project. It will run from Barna through to the hospital, NUIG, over the Salmon Weir Bridge, and through the centre out towards Parkmore. This is something Galway fundamentally needs because so much of the population is living on one side of the city and working on the other. This will give them an effective crossover point and access to the college, the hospital and the city centre. The Salmon Weir Bridge project is part of that. It has been funded this year and is going to construction. It will allow much safer active travel and is right in the centre of a beautiful part of the city. That will allow us to put in really high-quality public transport infrastructure on the bridge.

We have committed to doing further research on the light rail but I see it working in a similar way to what I think might happen in Cork and Dublin. There are similar plans for each of those three cities. Limerick is different because it has so much existing rail line, but for those three cities we will build high-quality bus corridors, get the patronage up and get the transport-led development. That will give us a signal as to where to put the housing and then we can upgrade it to light rail. The housing has to be connected to the transport planning.

If we were to look at accelerating things, there are various projects in Galway. The development of Oranmore railway station is funded in my mind and can be done by 2025. There is also the likes of the Dublin Road and other key projects. I am encouraged by what I see happening in Galway City Council and the fact that it is looking again at Salthill. It is willing to test different ways of doing things to see if we can change the sense of place and come out of Covid by holding onto some of the public space and using it in a different way from in the past. That cross-city link with a view to getting a quality bus corridor and making a safe active travel space is the way to go.

On electric vehicles, we have a real timeline challenge here because electric vehicles are coming at huge scale, beyond what anyone can expect. All the motor companies are starting to realise that if they do not provide electric vehicles and if they do not have the range capabilities of the cars that are now selling out, they will fall behind. Electric vehicles will be particularly useful for rural Ireland because there are not as many charging complications as in the city. In my constituency there is a real problem with charging cars in rows of terraced houses or apartments. It is not easy. In rural Ireland, it is much easier because the connection point is not a difficulty for a one-off house in the country. People also tend to do more miles because of the more dispersed settlement model and that is where electric cars come into their own because they are cheaper. Even with the current high electricity prices which, please God, will be a temporary phenomenon, electricity is still a fraction of the cost of petrol and diesel. That is before taking into account that the maintenance cost of an electric vehicle is also a fraction of that of a vehicle with a combustion engine.

Our Department is engaging on the issue of charging points. We have taken this responsibility from the Department of Environment, Climate and Communications because it is a transport project. We are looking at a range of initiatives. The high-speed chargers at the motorway stations and interchanges are starting to be effective. From my own personal experience using the 50 kW chargers, they give you the capability of covering the country because you can stop for half an hour, have a coffee and quick read of the paper and that will get you to Cork, stopping halfway. I agree with the Senator that we need to scale that up.

With regard to the destination points, it is not just an issue in Dungarvan. It is the same right around the country for endpoints like Clifden or Dingle. I hate to call them that but this is a real issue when people get to the end of a peninsula or a popular tourist route. We will have to roll out a range of chargers. There is a role here for the market as well as the State. The State is supporting the ESB to provide some of these motorway and other stations but there are also other providers like Ionity in urban petrol stations. That competition helps because hotels, retail outlets and shopping centres in those locations have an opportunity to gain business if they have good infrastructure. The challenge is the distribution grid. We need a strong grid in order to power these things and it is not always easy or popular to build a grid. People in Waterford will know that that has been a contentious issue in recent years but we need the grid. We are aware of the challenge of getting all those charging points in place because the cars are coming.