Ms Marie Donnelly:

I thank Deputy Kenny. The Deputy is right that when EVs came on the market, they were very expensive. We can already see a trend in the market where EVs are approaching the same price as fossil fuel cars. In some instances, their price is dropping faster. It is a progression, and it will take time before it really manifests. Within the next three years, however, we will see equality of prices between EVs and fossil fuel cars. We know from the analysis we have done that the key issue is that many people in Ireland buy a second-hand car rather than a new car. Part of the policy here was to populate the market with EVs so that we would generate and support a second-hand market. That is starting to manifest now. That will allow people to buy a second-hand EV rather than a new one, which perhaps is more appropriate in the context of what they can afford in their budget. That is important. We see this happening across the board in Europe and beyond Europe, with the number of EVs rolling out globally, in the United States, China and the Far East. The issue there is key.

On the question of range, it is a challenge depending on the brand of the car. Most of the cars will have a stated range of 250 km or 300 km.

In an excess of caution, most people would not drive the full 300 miles and would seek to charge the car after travelling a shorter distance. The key issue here is that if people are driving from a rural area, like the Deputy going from Sligo to Dublin, they need to know whether they will have access to a publicly available fast-charging point. They need to know they can stop, have a cup of coffee and when they return, the car will be charged and they can continue their journey. This is one of the key issues that is being addressed as part of the roll-out of charging points.

People in rural communities are more likely than others to have the space to have a home charger. More and more people in the agricultural sector in rural Ireland are putting solar panels on the roofs of milking parlours, barns, sheds and so on, and generating power. That power can be used to charge their electric car, if they have one, on site. We are not suggesting that every farmer will have only electric cars. However, many farmers have more than one vehicle and one of them, perhaps the smaller one, could easily be electric. Those cars could be fuelled by the power that farmers generate themselves, which means they would, in effect, be powered for free. That is one of the areas the Climate Change Advisory Council is working on with both the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. We are trying to get the grant systems to work together in order to have an holistic approach in the rural environment to investing in the generation of electricity and then using it to heat the home with a heat pump, for example, and also potentially to power an electric vehicle.

We have not done any studies on the cost of travel by train. The Deputy makes a fair point in that regard. We should do an analysis of train costs in Ireland and how they compare with those in other parts of Europe. The Deputy is probably right that there should be a charge, but it is a question of finding the balancing point as to what charge would be sufficiently attractive for people to take the train, particularly for longer journeys, rather than taking the car. We certainly will look at undertaking that area of research over the coming months.