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

The grant scheme we introduced some months ago for rural sports clubs has had a great response. Right across the country, therefore, people are picking up on this.

The Deputy is right that EVs are typically more expensive. They are coming down in price. There are conflictual aspects to this. The war in Ukraine has driven up the price of lithium, rare earth and other materials. There have also been supply chain difficulties. This context has presented a difficulty in respect of putting up prices. How this washes out exactly will depend on what happens in the war and in the context of wider global supply chain issues. If we look at what manufacturers are doing, however, a range of lower-cost vehicles is now starting to become available. There always were such vehicles, but these are now lower-cost cars that can still achieve a good range. I refer to the Fiat 500e, the new Nissan Leaf and the Peugeot e-208, all of which cost less than €30,000. I was in China last week and saw the latest BYD vehicle, which will be coming here and which will cost approximately €32,000. I have been told that Volkswagen is also launching a vehicle that will cost under €30,000. I am mentioning just some examples at random. Every car company is going in this direction. As the scale of production increases, and as these companies' entire ranges switch to being electric, we will start to see lower cost EVs. In effect, the entire market is going to go electric.

Dublin accounts for half of all EV sales. This is not a bad thing for a variety of reasons. One is that those EVs will then turn into the vehicles offered for sale in the second-hand market. We need a second-hand market in EVs. We also need commercial fleets. As the scale of production starts to increase, which it is and continues to do this year, all these vehicles will then start to turn into a second-hand market across the island. I would be very reluctant to get down to a geographically-based grant scheme. We would then be contending with questions such as where to draw the boundary-----