Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses. I agree with Senator Doherty that it is quite an exciting time, not just for the conference, but also for Ireland when we put it in the context of the programme for Government agreement, where we agreed to spend the transport budget 2:1 on public transport over new roads, and also the significant negotiation around active travel spend. Ireland is in a position where we are trying to catch up with a lot of our European counterparts, so this conference is an opportunity to learn from the mistakes they made along the way.

We can look at places like the Netherlands, which I understand the transport committee visited last year, and also the conference at Seville recently. When we look at all of these towns and villages in European countries and ask why we cannot have that, the answer is that we can have it, and we have put in place budgets and policy objectives to deliver that. However, it does take time. If we looked at Dutch streets in, say, Amsterdam 20 or 30 years ago, they were not like they are now. They had that battle about the street-road space allocation and with the traders, who will always argue that removing parking spaces is bad for business, when we can show it is quite good for business. The opportunity to learn from European counterparts who have gone this road already is quite exciting.

There are a couple of areas of transport innovation that I would like to raise. I do not know the process for raising these and whether we can bring them to the conference to learn from them. One area is the discontinuous overhead electrification of rail lines, which Germany has looked at. Conventionally, what we would have done is have an overhead electrified system and it would be continuous overhead all along the route that the train would take. However, Germany has what are called discontinuous systems which can electrify a 60 km section and the next section of 60 km is not electrified, but the train has charged during the first 60 km and runs the next 60 km off charge. If we take Dublin to Cork, to electrify that route we would only have to cover perhaps half of it with that conventional overhead electrification system. It is something we could look at. We are very low on electrification of rail lines compared to our European counterparts, although the DART+ programme will try to overcome that by adding another 50 km of electrification.

On a second area, I am not sure if this is something we should be raising with the witnesses now or something we should bring to the conference. It concerns the freight systems in Ireland, especially rail freight. I believe we could greatly develop rail freight in Ireland. Rosslare Europort is generally roll-on, roll-off freight, with lorry-driven containers being put onto ships and driven off at the other end. However, we have two rail lines converging at Rosslare port. I have seen at European level where systems have been developed to take rail-based freight and transfer it onto the ship. It obviously needs the equivalent at the other end to take it off, but it would help us to maximise the use of Rosslare Europort for containers, especially given Brexit, as it might provide a quicker route to Europe.

On electric vehicles, EVs, we have set various targets and many people seem to pin all future hopes of travel on massive EV penetration into the Irish market. I do not necessarily agree with that. If we were to just seek to exchange every single petrol and diesel vehicle that we have on the road for electric vehicles, we would still have congestion, road safety issues and certain air quality issues associated with EVs, such as from brakes and tyres. I would be interested in the learning from other countries. Many countries tend to be ahead of us and we tend to follow the curve a lot of the time in Ireland.

One particular curve that I am very disappointed to see us follow is the increasing purchase of large SUV-type vehicles. I was watching something on Netflix recently that was set in a Scandinavian country, and what was quite noticeable was that a lot of the cars were much smaller than what we see on Irish roads. I wonder if our counterparts in Europe and other places have gone through that splurge on large SUVs. The marketing is very slick. When people look at an ad for an SUV, they say, “I want that because I want to drive those lovely mountain roads with that soundtrack and no traffic.” It is not like that in reality. To my mind, they are more dangerous, especially the EV versions, which are just heavier and are going to consume more energy. I would be interested in the learnings from others at that conference.

We mentioned marine freight in terms of hydrogen for use in shipping. Obviously, that is something that will have to be developed at a European level but I would be interested to know what progress has been made at a European level. We have this enormous potential in our offshore to develop and produce more electricity than we are going to need in this country and to convert that to hydrogen either for export or for use in areas like shipping. I would be interested in all of those aspects.

Again, these are exciting times in transport. We have a lot to learn here in Ireland but we certainly have the direction, the policy direction and the budgets to support that. I wish the witnesses well at the conference.