Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the Minister on the progress he has made. I recall when I had the climate brief back in whenever it was - 2019 - and the outlook of the transport Department was much different from what it is today in terms of trying to achieve change. That said, it is disappointing, as the Minister admitted in his statement, that there is no guarantee that the transport targets will be hit within the carbon budget.

I was trying to think of how we drive greater performance. I believe vehicle sharing, as opposed to ownership, has potential. I was disappointed to visit the mobility hub in Finglas, as I know the Minister was there. I do not think the location is great and I do not think it is being driven in a way that it could transform people’s thinking about transport in that area. If we were to proceed with these mobility hubs, which I greatly support, we have to think much more about the location, how we get people on board with it, how we give people confidence and how the council promotes it. It looks to me as if it has been dropped there and a box ticked. It is not enough.

The performance on EV charging by the local authority has been appalling. If I am not wrong, grants were made available for EV charging five years ago and the take-up remains pathetic. I am not sure if the Dublin authorities have even had a procurement for theirs. It is a genuine hold-up. There are local authority social homes where people cannot get charging and there does not seem to be anyone answerable for delivering EV charging to local authority homeowners who want an EV car and do not have the space allocated to them or whatever. We need to get our finger out on that.

On the wider issue, vehicle size remains an annoyance, I think to everyone. I wish to get the Minister's view on the escalation of vehicle size, even at a time when we are trying to reduce carbon emissions. Would he consider a circular economy initiative to try to drive change in transport? What I am thinking of is trying to put an onus on enterprises to have carbon reduction for their workers and their logistics, for example, on schools, shopping or leisure centres to consider how they can facilitate lower carbon emission in their operations.

For public transport, it is looking at low occupancy, times and how they can facilitate use of vehicles at low-occupancy times to stop the single-person car going on the road for a very short run. Can we create more vehicle-sharing networks and infrastructure for moving away from everyone owning one car per apartment to multiple apartments being served by a pool of cars? There is an opportunity to lift the thinking out of where it is but it will need something more than what is happening at the moment. I would be interested to hear what we might do. There is a willingness and an awareness but we probably have not joined the dots and given people enough ways to start the journey.