Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Ms Donnelly mentioned the issue of having enough EV chargers motorways. Is there an issue with capacity? The owner of a filling station told me some time ago that they were looking to get these chargers in but the power supplier had a limit on the number of stations it could install because the network did not have sufficient capacity to provide them. When someone with an EV wants to get it recharged, they find in many places that the charger either does not work when they arrive - that problem is less frequent now than it was a couple of years ago - or there are more people queuing to charge their EV because there are more electric cars. Instead of it taking 20 minutes to recharge, they end up waiting an hour and 20 minutes and another 20 minutes to get their vehicle charged. That is a real problem for people.

I want to mention an issue that brings us back to the real issue, which was spoken about earlier. I am thinking about an individual in my part of the world who is undergoing cancer treatment in Galway. He lives in a rural area but does not have a car and does not drive. There is no rail service for him to go from Galway to Sligo. The western rail corridor is not operational.

The development of population in Ireland has been centred on Dublin. In most other countries, there are large cities half or three quarters the size of Dublin at the other end of the country. There may be two or three of them and there is movement between them. Here, everything either goes to or comes back from Dublin. That is the issue. If somebody from Sligo wants to go to Limerick or Cork, he or she has to go to Dublin first and then to Cork. That is ridiculous. We need alternative routes and transport corridors, other than those that simply go to the capital and back.

Ms Donnelly mentioned that we need to get more traffic moving via rail, rather than moving bulk transport with trucks. I visited Dublin Port recently. It has a rail terminal but much of the freight is moved in containers on trucks. It tells me - this is part of the point I was making with regard to everything being in the city - that 70% of the containers that come in are delivered within 90 km of Dublin. This means there is not much point in having a rail line that goes somewhere else when most of it will actually end up back in distribution centres that are in or close to Dublin. How can we identify what products are suitable to be delivered or transported by rail, particularly if they have to go a long journey on the island? How do we try to co-ordinate that properly so our ports are able to deliver?