Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I agree and that is why we are going to fund, through the climate action fund, the incentives to make that happen. The key partnership is with the grid. It is where you have sufficient power supply. I agree with the Deputy and we will work with local authorities to make that work.

Similarly, I agree on vehicle size. We are working with the Department of Finance which has a remit in this area to see what we can do in our tax system to try to discourage this trend towards ever-larger vehicles which create real difficulties in parking, road safety, environmental impact and also expense.

It goes in the wrong direction in so many different ways. There is a slight race to the bottom. If you feel that everyone else is in a massive car and you will be in an impact with that, you might think that you had better have a vehicle of similar size to protect yourself. That is not the way we want to go. The demand management strategy with which we are due to go to Government in the next few weeks will be key in a variety of these areas, including promoting shared mobility, looking at how we manage parking and examining other demand management measures.

The smarter travel mark is one of the pathfinder projects where we go to employers to see can we change the way, particularly at this time of change with remote working, and reconfigure how we travel to work. I would cite my own Department, the Department of Transport, in that regard. It was one of the first to get that gold mark in smarter travel. We have reduced our car parking in the Department from approximately 120 vehicles to 40. We are leading by example. It is not impossible. When you start to have those sort of changes, that is material. If we did that in every office, it would start to have a significant change. Another example is Trinity College Dublin, which is right in the centre of the city. Only 2% of its staff and-or students commute by car to the college.