Christopher O'Sullivan (Cork South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for attending today and for his opening statement. We have seen press coverage recently around Ireland's increasing emissions. None of us is happy with that and none of us can be proud of it. There is always a tendency to lay everything at the Minister's feet as if he can single-handedly stop this trend or reverse the trend. I believe that is unfair. Obviously, however, the Minister does have quite a large role to play in it.

I want to talk about where the local authorities can play a role in this. I will go through it bit by bit. Obviously, the climate action plan has just been published and announced so we cannot expect overnight implementation. The climate legislation has been in place for quite a while now, so we all are expecting to see these emissions begin to go the opposite way and we expect to see a reduction in emissions.

I also want to speak about the issue from the perspective of being a rural Deputy in west Cork, which is a pretty much predominantly a rural area. How can we implement at a faster pace some of those smaller measures that will make a big difference to rural parts of Ireland and to the emissions? One could consider it death by a thousand cuts.

Any one of these measures would have a limited impact overall on reducing emissions, but when combined and when bringing them all together, we will start to see emissions reductions.

The first issue I want to speak about relates to the plan to enhance local authorities by incentivising them to install EV charging points. I want the Minister's opinion on that and maybe an update on that. We are not seeing them in west Cork in the likes of the Beara Peninsula, the Mizen Head Peninsula or in the more western parts of my constituency. Even in Clonakilty, we do not have a fast-charging point. We have a charging point, but we do not have a fast-charging point. In Bandon, there is one in a private petrol station.

I will give the Minister a few examples of what it is like where I am from. EV technology has moved so far. The range in these cars is incredible and we can see that. We are seeing more and more EVs on the road. I can tell the Minister that in a place like west Cork, there is a reluctance to go down the EV route because of the lack of charging infrastructure. Thankfully, the benefit of a rural area is that many homeowners will have their own front gardens and driveways and therefore installing those Zappi chargers is a realistic option. However, if one is in a town or in a terraced house, that is not so much of an option. We therefore need more EV infrastructure. Is there any update on that? Can we get the message to the local authorities that they need to start installing these things at a quicker pace? There needs to be some direction.