Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Ó Murchú. I apologise to our guests. There is incessant chaos here as so many committees coincide. I followed most of the debate upstairs and was juggling another committee earlier. I have a few points I want to make and will not take ten minutes.

There is an element of the chicken and the egg to all this. Some people, ideologically, were willing straight away when the first generation of EVs became available to throw the car keys out the window and buy an EV; however, others were less willing. For some people it must make economic sense and there must be an infrastructure, so there is a bit of a pioneering element to all this. I am probably in that bracket. I cycle and I take the train to the Dáil but I have a diesel car for getting around Clare. To be honest, I do not yet trust there is enough infrastructure on the ground and there are an awful lot of people like that. They will wait until the infrastructure is there before making that seismic shift in how they live their lives. That is the chicken and egg aspect. A forecourt owner in the county told me it would cost him €500,000 per fast charging unit in his forecourt. He said a diesel or petrol pump costs virtually nothing because they all have tanks underground and with some of the larger companies the forecourt operators virtually pay for the pumps. It is not so with fast chargers. To Dr. O'Grady and Ms Waller, are there any incentives to get forecourts transitioning to this? I cannot move and more people cannot do so unless the infrastructure is in the forecourt.