Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

It is incredibly important and I am not sure we have actually cracked the issue of how we retrofit rentals yet.

I am not sure who is responsible among our speakers for the public charge points scheme. We talked a little this morning about the increasing use of electric cars and the need to roll out a network of charging points. The public charge points scheme is in particular, for those who are not aware, for people for whom home charging is just not possible. In my constituency there are many terraced houses where people park on-street and they would need access to that system. I understand that as part of the scheme grants of up to €5,000 are awarded to support the development of on-street public charging. Dublin City Council actually applied and was approved for nine public charge points. What happened with this funding? I have been chasing it up and Dublin City Council informed me it has not received any funding under this initiative despite receiving a letter of offer last summer. The SEAI was repurposing the scheme to reflect the actualities of the market better; that is the phrase that I have from my questions. On top of this, the Minister for Transport informed me on Tuesday that €143,000 plus some change has been allocated by his Department in total to date. Where is the funding, where does that money lie? I understand the Dublin local authority electric vehicle charging strategy is underway and is due to be published soon. We will see more in this area but that is not really my question in terms of what DCC is doing. I want to know what has happened to the funding that was supposed to be allocated under the public charge points scheme from July 2021, nearly nine months ago.