Mr. Paul Jackman:

I will go on to speak about fuel but first I will make a point about the youth. Some 72% of young people are getting third level qualifications. It is the highest level in Europe. One day in Dungarvan, we had an open day for 616 students. A couple of hauliers helped me. We set up a stand. We were approached by 15 students, both male and female, who were all very interested in pursuing it as a career. To a person, while they got the information, they all stated the same thing: their parents wanted them to go to third level. That is an issue.

I will preface my remarks on fuel quality by saying there is possibly an illusion out there that we do not need to worry too much about fuel because we will all be electric in a couple of years. Senator Collins's laughter is the perfect response. In 2022, the EU consumed 71 billion litres of diesel. Ireland consumed 3.6 billion litres. We analysed the ETC fuel quality report to death. Without going into too much detail, there is no oversight of fuel quality in Ireland. The CCPC website states categorically - it did not know about it until we told it - that there is no State regulatory authority responsible for fuel quality in Ireland. That might have been acceptable years ago when diesel was diesel but now, to a greater extent, there are different types of biofuel and other components being added to diesel. The Department of the environment has responsibility for sending our mandatory 100 samples a year to Europe. It has handed that over to Fuels for Ireland, so an entity representing the commercial retailers is responsible for taking 100 samples, which is an absolute minimum. We do not report any non-compliance. We have zero non-compliance.