Ms Marie Donnelly:

The Deputy is absolutely right about the avoid, shift and improve. Avoid is really down to spatial planning. If people are living in a situation where they can access the services, they can use active transport and active mechanisms, that is the 15- or 20-minute city, town or village as the case may be. That avoids the necessity for emissions in transport. The "shift" is of course out of private cars and into more public buses, trains or whatever. The "improve" is to improve the technology involving things like electric vehicles and biofuels in transport to reduce emissions in the system there.

One of the very legitimate points the OECD made in its study was that our initial policy was focused on the number of EVs we were going to have in the country as if that was enough to produce a solution when in fact it is not. The Deputy is absolutely right. We are talking about 1 million EVs and if we still keep the 2 million fossil fuel cars, we just end up with 3 million vehicles on the road meaning that congestion is much worse, air quality does not improve and certainly our emissions do not improve. The key issue is to substitute the fossil fuel vehicles with electric vehicles but at a reduced level. We need to go from the 2.2 million cars we have to a lower number; it obviously is not a fixed number. The key issue is to give people an alternative. Many households have two cars and some might even have three. What is the possibility of going from two cars to one car? That would lead to a 50% reduction which is quite dramatic and has a real impact. It does not deprive people of a car; it does not stop them using the car. It is just having one car instead of two cars. It is just a question. We may need to think about it and look at it in more detail.

The Deputy is absolutely right about the size of the car. Almost 50% of our cars are of the SUV type, heavy duty cars with very high levels of in-body carbon. They are very heavy cars even leaving aside the weight of the battery. It is not sure that we actually need cars of that size. Certainly not all our cars need to be of that size. One of the questions we have been asking is: what is the policy on advertising cars? How many times do television adverts for cars, particularly larger cars, feature the car stuck in traffic? That is where a car spends most of its time. They tend to show the car on the open road or on an empty street. It has the road to itself and it is wonderful. One wonders how misleading the advertising even for cars is. This is not just an Irish problem; it is a general problem across the western and developed world.

The council's position is that our taxation system through the excise duty and vehicle registration tax applied should reflect the carbon emissions of vehicles. We have said that before and that is our position on that.

On scrappage, we have done some analysis on the fleet in Ireland. Our ownership of cars is at or about the European average. The age of our cars is also at or about the European average. It is not as though we have a particularly old fleet. At ten or 12 years the fleet is at the European average. The question of scrappage will become much more relevant as we move towards 2035. It will not just be an Irish problem. As the Deputy will know, it has now been voted in Europe that the internal combustion engine from 2035 cannot emit emissions, which effectively finishes their commercialisation in Europe from 2035.

The whole of Europe is going to be confronted with the reality of a car market that is going to have to shift slowly, progressively, but more rapidly the closer we get to 2035. We will need policies for that, and we will need innovation for it because thinking about just scrapping all of the cars and putting them in a pile in the corner is not a solution. Similarly, we are now beginning to realise that buildings, rather than knocking them down and starting again, should be valued, the embodied carbon retained, and the house revalued, renovated or upgraded as the case may be. This is a better opportunity than just scrapping it.

Not just in Ireland, but more generally we are going to have to think about what we are going to do with the vehicles that are on the market for which people will not be able to find buyers. If someone has a fossil fuel car that is six years old - just for the sake of discussion - in 2033, to whom is he or she going to sell the car? That is a real question we have to think about, and the consequences of the decision that has now been taken in Europe and that will apply to Ireland as well. That will have an impact on our car stock, car market and car ownership going forward. At the moment, the council has not done any studies on that, but it is certainly an area around which we have started to have a conversation.