Mr. Dave McCabe:

I will address Deputy Stanley's question about the chargers. The public charging network is significant. It is a place where EV drivers meet the infrastructure. It is very important. We have 80 fast DC chargers. Some of them are correctly positioned in motorway service stations and various places along our transport arteries. However, some are incorrectly positioned in shopping centres where they get abused by people who go shopping while they charge their car when a car only takes 20 minutes to recharge. The standard charge points are known by users as slow charging points. The vast majority of modern EVs use DC charging and many cannot adequately utilise the power available from the standard charge point. The Nissan Leaf only draws one third of the available power and the Hyundai Ioniq only draws about half of the available power from those points. That is unlikely to change because manufacturers are shifting to DC charging. The emphasis in the future will undoubtedly be on DC charging and AC charging will probably take place in the home and in what we call destination charging, which is in hotels and places where people leave their cars for long periods. Many of our standard chargers are in the wrong places. We had issues in Dublin where we did not have any street parking for them and that needs to be sorted. We are very lucky to have that infrastructure but we need to take it another step forward. The State now has to get involved in deciding how and where that infrastructure grows and develops and how it meets the needs of supporting all the EVs we hope will suddenly appear on the market.