Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

A number of committees need to look at this issue. From the perspective of the Committee of Public Accounts, there is a value-for-money issue here. The international evidence is clear: without grant support, electric vehicles will not be purchased to a great degree. When Denmark started to withdraw grants, the sales immediately dropped. It is a given. We need to see increased use of EVs and we need a grant scheme that supports their use. My difficulty with the current grant scheme - the figures bear this out - is that it is disproportionately used by wealthier people living in areas with public transport as opposed to the very people we should be incentivising, those who live in areas without electric vehicles. The irony is that they are subsidising the new cars through being forced to pay carbon tax because they have no choice other than to drive diesel or petrol cars. There is an inherent unfairness.

It does not make sense to pay out so much in grants to private individuals while we still have tens of thousands of vehicles owned by public bodies which are not EVs. Many local authority vehicles are not EVs, yet we are giving grants to private individuals. We still have Garda vehicles that are not EVs. We cannot just say that this is how it works and this is how we will operate. We certainly cannot take the position of the SEAI that in the long term poorer people who are currently being penalised will be able to buy second-hand vehicles from the people who got the grants for the new cars. That appears to be the long-term strategy. That is inherently unfair and not achieving what we need from an environmental point of view. I agree with the Chairman that this needs to be analysed before we end up spending €1 billion on EV grants while doing little to reduce transport emissions.