Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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The purpose of the meeting today is a discussion of sectoral emission ceilings for transport. We are joined remotely by Ms Marie Donnelly, chairperson of the Climate Change Advisory Council. I am very pleased to welcome Ms Donnelly.

I will read out a note on privilege to both witnesses and members. Witnesses are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if witnesses' statements are potentially defamatory in respect of an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

Members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice to the effect that they should not comment on, criticise or make charges against a person outside the Houses or an official either by name or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable. I remind members of the constitutional requirement that they must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex in order to participate in public meetings. I will not permit a member to participate where he or she does not adhere to this constitutional requirement. Therefore, any member who attempts to participate from outside the precincts will be asked to leave the meeting. In this regard, I ask all members participating via Microsoft Teams that, prior to making their contributions to the meeting, they confirm they are on the grounds of the Leinster House campus. If attending in the committee room, members are asked to exercise personal responsibility to protect themselves and others from the risk of contracting Covid-19.

Ms Donnelly is very welcome. I invite her to make her opening statement.

Ms Mary Donnelly:

I am glad to join the committee to discuss the importance of climate change mitigation in the transport sector. I appreciate that I can do this virtually because that saves quite a few emissions in transport from Kinsale up to Dublin for the meeting.

The committee has my written submission. I will make a slightly shorter oral statement in order to save time. Last year, the Oireachtas legislated for two carbon budgets up to 2030. The Government subsequently set out a series of sectoral ceilings within those budgets including one for transport. While this is very positive, the council nonetheless underlines the absence of a sectoral ceiling for land use, land-use change and forestry, LULUCF, and notes that we still have a gap in the second carbon budget to our target.

The transport sector in Ireland is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The ceilings that have been set called for a 50% reductions in emissions from the 2018 number by 2030. The council has noted that this is an ambitious target and sectoral ceiling and will require early and fundamental change in the Irish transport system. However, from a positive perspective almost all the measures to reduce transport emissions have potentially positive impacts such as improving air quality, reducing noise, improving the well-being and health outcomes of the population while also protecting households from volatile fossil-fuel crises. It is not just for climate that we propose these measures. They have co-benefits across a whole range of aspects of our society.

For the sectoral ceiling, we started with the number for 2018, which was 12.2. Our target for 2030 is six. I am using the shortened version of the numbers because it gets very complicated otherwise. That that means that the 12.2 figure must come down each year somewhat in the first carbon budget and quite significantly in the second. Transport has got a benefit in terms of emissions as a result of the Covid restrictions that we all went through both in 2019 and 2020 with some follow-through also in 2021. As a consequence, our emissions in the transport sector in 2021 fell to 10.9. That was very positive from an emissions perspective. However, while we do not have the final figures for 2022, we can already see that the emissions for 2022 are rebounding and are increasing. The council is concerned that if this rebound and continual increase of emissions continues as it is in the first carbon budget will mean that we will not be able to stay within the first carbon budget for transport and that will have consequences for the second carbon budget.

To endeavour to stay within our carbon budget the council made a number of recommendations in its annual review last year. I will list a few. These included the reduction in public transport fares and cost-of-living measures that were introduced in respect of the transport sector. The council considered these were positive and also just and fair across society and recommended that they would be continued. We are pleased that they were continued in budget 2023. We also called for the electrification of public transport because as we move forward, public transport will play a greater role in our transport system and therefore it needs to decarbonise very quickly.

We also recommended that low-cost finance initiatives be extended to include the purchase of electric vehicles, EVs. This might be relevant in rural parts of the country, where public transport will not be able to substitute for a privately owned vehicle. Therefore, we should be supporting people to decarbonise their transport through these new technologies and facilitating the finance cost for them.

A specific area that the council identified was road space reallocation. I will mention that again later because it came on foot of a very extensive study that we commissioned by the OECD. Road reallocation was one of its key messages for Ireland from the study. In this context, local authorities have a very important role to play. Even though not covered by our carbon budgets at the moment, the council is also concerned about emissions both in the aviation and marine sectors. The council considers that we need to start addressing these because they will be covered progressively, as we go forward, with European legislative developments. In the medium and longer term, our transport emissions will ultimately be influenced by our spatial planning decisions. If we can achieve land-use planning and public transport infrastructures that coincide and facilitate living and living with access to services nearby, whereby people have choices that they can make in terms of accessing those services other than, for example, using a private car, that will facilitate this mitigated action that we need to undertake.

Just for the record, the council commissions research each year. I have already mentioned the OECD report, which was a significant in emphasising the necessity for the reallocation of road space and the move in terms of spatial planning. We have also done an analysis of the subsidies for fossil fuels, particularly in the transport sector. Both of those studies are available on our website. We will be happy to send copies to the committee should it wish us to do so. The council welcomes the updated transport chapter in the Climate Action Plan 2023, and particularly welcomes the focus on the avoid, shift, improve paradigm in establishing policies. It is one that the council has recommended and we welcome that manifesting itself in the climate action plan of 2023. The council acknowledges the significant challenge that exists in reducing emissions in the transport space. It will have an impact on individuals and businesses. It is important that we leave nobody behind in that process, and that we ensure that we have a just transition as we mitigate our emissions in the transport space. As I said at the outset, many of the changes that we need to make are indeed positive in a general sense for society. The challenge that we have and, indeed, the investments that we need to make as we go forward need to be designed to deliver a just transition but also one that delivers benefits to the society as well as delivering on our climate action in the transport space.

We are now in year 3 of the carbon budget. It is a pivotal moment in that cycle in order to ensure that we can stay within the budget and achieve our legislative objectives. It will not be easy, but the council is very pleased to work with the members of the committee and others in terms of achieving the policy and taking the actions that will be necessary to maintain our reduction of emissions in the transport sector going forward over the next number of years.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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Our first contributor is Deputy Cathal Crowe, who has five minutes. Before he starts, I welcome Deputy Kenny as a new member of the committee and thank Deputy Ó Murchú for his service up to now.

Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)
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I congratulate the Leas-Chathaoirleach on his election. I thank Ms Donnelly for her contribution. I read her opening statement and as often happens when a witness comes before the committee, we do a bit of CV research. Ms Donnelly's CV is very impressive indeed. I note that she was director of renewables in the Directorate-General for Energy, DG ENER, in the European Commission in Brussels. We very much value her expertise and opinion on this matter. I have a few questions. I am a rural Deputy and I hope that I am representative of the people in my county not just politically, but in terms of the outlook of people in rural Ireland. I have made a number of personal changes. At home, we have moved to organic farming since January and have taken up cycling and I now take the train to Dublin. However, there is so much more that people in rural Ireland want to do but are inhibited from doing, perhaps by a lack of recharging infrastructure and public transport being proximate to their place of work or home. There are limitations on how much people beyond city environments can do at the moment. The suggestion made some months ago by the Minister for Transport that we would bring in some punitive measures around car ownership got the hackles up in rural Ireland again. People want to do a whole lot more, but the term "just transition" can be applied in many contexts. The just transition also has to apply in terms of public transport and how some parts of the country can grasp that a lot sooner than others. If you have a Luas stop outside your front door, bingo; if you live in parts of west Clare, there might be a bus at 8 a.m. and another at 7.30 p.m. That is damn all use if someone is trying to get to work, school or whatever.

I want to ask Ms Donnelly a number of questions. Does she feel that the charging infrastructure that we have nationwide, not just in urban settings, is sufficient at this time to get us to where we want to be? Looking at best practice in other countries, Luxembourg is one that springs to mind, given that grasped the nettle and decided to make public transport free. It has not been a full success, but the decision was taken to do it as a way of enticing people to use public transport. I ask Ms Donnelly to comment on some of those measures, and also, wearing her European hat, on where there is best practice that we should be trying to replicate.

Ms Marie Donnelly:

I thank the Deputy for the questions. He is absolutely right to point out the real situation here in Ireland. We are a very dispersed population in a large space, relatively speaking. Therefore, transport is a particular challenge in Ireland. To answer the questions the Deputy raised specifically, the council has already said that charging support on both our motorways and, indeed, off motorways in Ireland is inadequate. We fully support the substantial roll-out of publicly accessible charging points on motorways and also at points within urban and rural spaces, towns and villages. I am aware that there is a programme being rolled out by the Department of Transport to enhance not only the numbers but also the capacity of the charging points on motorways, and to roll out additional charging points in towns, on streets and in villages. It is taking time. It is not happening fast enough, but at least the plan is there and we can monitor it, as we are doing, and follow it. I would make one point associated with it. In these charging points we are using electricity. Our objective, of course, is to decarbonise the electricity system in Ireland. We can do that by using renewables, including wind and solar power. It is important that we ensure that we can generate enough renewable electricity to support the roll-out of charging points - and fast charging points, because that requires a little bit extra from the grid - so that we can support people when the are using EVs in their transport mechanisms. We can start to see how transport will ultimately link with electricity and how it does not stop there, because it also goes to housing and planning. The whole system interconnects. However, in this specific area there is a shortage of charging points, and of fast charging points specifically. I acknowledge that and agree with the Deputy there.

Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)
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I might try to squeeze in one last question because the clock is against me. I agree with Ms Donnelly. We all want to make seismic changes, but if a person is thinking about changing the car at the moment, in some parts of the country the infrastructure is not there to do so.

You might go to the forecourt and admire a beautiful electric car that will tick all the boxes it should tick but that will not be viable for someone if the necessary infrastructure is not within 5 km or 10 km of their home or in their home environment itself.

Although our committee deals with the broader remit of transport and communications, we have done a great deal of work on aviation. We have to congratulate, to some degree, the aviation sector, for leading on sustainable aviation fuels, SAFs. Unless I have totally missed the debate, which I have been following closely, I do not see the same movements being made in regard to sustainable marine fuels. Many of the larger vessels that leave Ireland are oil fired, while the smaller ones are diesel powered. Does Ms Donnelly have concerns about that? There is a good data set on aviation outputs and the carbon footprint of that, and there is a response, albeit slow. SAFs are coming on stream and Ireland will play a role, I hope, in the use of hydrogen in the west. Will Ms Donnelly comment on the use of marine fuel? Globally, it is seen as one of the big polluters. The cruise ship industry, of course, gets bad press. We do not have a huge cruise ship industry in Ireland but many vessels travel around our coastline. How could the Government, with a carrot as opposed to a stick, lead some transformation there?

Ms Marie Donnelly:

To finish on the point about charging points, one emphasis the council has placed on the question of charging relates to the fact the analysis has shown that for EVs, 80% of charging will take place in people's homes. As the committee will be aware, people can get a grant from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, for a home charger, which can be used in a home location. That is an important element and an important support. If you happen to have a smart meter or even if you just have nitrate electricity, you can charge your car at a reduced electricity price at home, for example, at night. That is an important point we need to keep to the fore in the context of EVs.

On Luxembourg, the Deputy is correct. It has rolled out its free transport policy. Paris, too, has done expensive experimentation on alternative costings for its public transport, as has Brussels. Most of the studies, including our own early analysis of what has happened in Ireland, show that reduced fares have increased passenger numbers in public transport, and that is why, from the council's perspective, this is something we consider should be continued-----

Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)
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Has the council at any time advised the Government to bring free public transport into our city environments? Has that ever been explicit advice from the council?

Ms Marie Donnelly:

Not free transport but reduced-cost transport. Indeed, one areas of emphasis of the council relates not just to reduced-cost transport, which is what we are looking at now, but also to schoolchildren transport. The council is concerned we must ensure access to school is done in a way that can reduce emissions, and that means access to low-cost public transport for children going to school in both rural and urban spaces. In that context, I return to what I said earlier. It is not just emissions but also, ultimately, air quality, safety for schoolchildren and congestion in the spaces around schools. That is the council's position and we are continuing to monitor the impact of the approach.

With regard to aviation, the Deputy is quite right. The most recent European Green Deal legislation coming through now is mandating the dropping of an element of SAF in aviation, but it is also putting in place provisions for marine. One area for marine fuels that is being looked at is ammonia. There are difficulties with ammonia, given it is a very caustic fuel, but as a substitute for some of the heavy-duty diesel, which is what a lot of the marine sector uses, it certainly provides opportunities. These provisions are likely to come in within the next few years. The concern is that aviation and, indeed, marine transport tend to be global, so it is difficult for an individual country to introduce provisions that can impact on the entire industry. It needs to be done at a global level. As the Deputy will be aware, the Corsica provision is in place for aviation and there are provisions under the green deal for shipping. Ireland should and will follow those as and when they come into effect.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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I thank Ms Donnelly. I read her opening statement, which is quite technical in nature and which contains a lot of jargon, last night. I had to reread a bit of it. I am not unfamiliar or uncomfortable with numbers, but there was a lot in it. She will be pleased to know I am one of the few people in this room who are able to cycle to and from the House regularly, as I did this morning and will do later. I do my best in terms of modal shift but there is a lot more we can do in that context to get people to change their habits. Twenty years ago, I would not have thought about cycling anywhere. Many people are probably in that space. They are used to getting around in the car and it is the default setting of how they get around in many cases. I appreciate people have to go shopping, collect family members and so on, which is different, but a lot of our journeys are done on our own. There is an opportunity, whether through giving or lending people a bike or letting them have one for six months, perhaps, with their use to be tracked or whatever, to get people back into thinking it is doable. A journey by car might take three or four times as long in an urban environment. Obviously, it will not work in rural settings where the distances are long and the congestion is low. Public transport is good and improving, but we need to focus on active travel. I know I will travel to the city centre from my house, about 6 km away, far faster on a bike than I will on a bus or even a Luas by the time I get to the station and wait for one. The Luas is a great service, but I can make the journey by bicycle in half the time.

The spatial planning point is very interesting. I recall being in the Seanad in 2016 and 2017 when the then Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, Deputy Coveney, told us 13,000 houses had been built, of which 7,000 were one-offs. While some of them were needed, the mix at the time was not going to provide for the density of population.

As for electric cars, they do not reduce congestion, even though they are being seen as kind of the answer to everything. They are certainly going to improve air quality and decarbonising the system as long as we can get the power from decarbonised electricity, which is a challenge in itself. We are all in favour of offshore wind and we discussed that with representatives of Shannon Foynes Port last week. Nevertheless, I have a car and use it, and if I were to give it up, I would start to lose my no-claims bonus for insurance and all that goes with the track record associated with being a driver. They are all complicating factors as to why somebody might keep and use a car rather than use, for example, a GoCar. There are reasons people are not changing habits in the way they might. I once asked Irish Rail whether I could drive to Heuston Station, put my car on the train, get the train to Killarney and be able to use my car when I got to Killarney, and I was told the journeys in Ireland were not long enough to justify that kind of behaviour or to buy carriages that would carry such vehicles. We need to push every journey we take to see whether we can do it in a more sustainable way. In many cases, people cannot, but for many other journeys, if people made the jump, they would realise the school trip is just as quick cycling or walking as it is in a car by the time you get there, queue to park and park, walk back from the car and vice versa. What else are we not doing that we should be doing to get to a better place?

Ms Marie Donnelly:

First, I say "Well done" on the Leas-Chathaoirleach's active travel mode. He is absolutely right; ours is the second highest car dependency in Europe, at 76%-----

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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Whose is higher than us?

Ms Marie Donnelly:

Cyprus, believe it or not. It is also a small island. Of course, these are just surveys and the results will vary, but 60% of our journeys take less than 15 minutes, and about the same proportion are less than 2 km. The Leas-Chathaoirleach cycles 6 km, so he will know 2 km is not a very long distance, whether walking or cycling. It is a matter of attitude and practice. Part of the process is communication of the message, as he rightly said, but it is also about facilitating people to get out of the car and take the alternatives.

For cycling, that means road space needs to be reallocated. A sufficient number of cycle paths need to be in place whereby people feel safe, including at junctions, because if one does not get the junction right, it can be very dangerous for a cyclist. Also, our streets need to be attractive to walk in. One area that the council has discussed is a personal hobby horse of mine. Looking at the number of trees in our urban spaces and comparing it with somewhere like Berlin, in the past ten years more than 80,000 trees have been planted in Berlin. When one walks in the streets now, there is a green, shaded, pleasant environment to walk in. We tend not to use our footpaths and pedestrian areas for planting trees and other shrubs, as the case may be, to make the environment pleasant for people to walk in. Part of the process involves putting the infrastructure in place, whether for cycling or pedestrians, then making it attractive for people to use those possibilities and to become familiar with them.

The Chair is absolutely right about one-off houses. We have recent figures on that. The number of one-off houses is still increasing, notwithstanding the national development plan and all the statements that have been made with regard to trying to have compact settlements and developments. We still have an increasing number of one-off houses. The Chair is absolutely right that this places a challenge on the public transport sector to try to facilitate the people who own those houses.

It is important to acknowledge that our public transport system needs two things. It needs to provide a service that is cost-effective, reliable and always on time for the people. It might not be the most convenient time but at least if people know it will be the time, that is a positive element. The second issue is that we need to speed up the rate at which our public transport is decarbonised. We need to move away from diesel buses. We need to have electric transport facilities available for our public transport so that we can decarbonise that transport and make that offer available to people who want to use it. I hope I have covered the questions.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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I would like Ms Donnelly to communicate some of my points to the Government and the relevant Ministers. I just wanted to air them. The Luas is fantastic. It is a magnet for people. They get sucked in. They want reliability. I do not mind walking for 15 minutes to a stop because I know the Luas will arrive four minutes later. I could be waiting for half an hour for a bus. If it goes missing, I will be waiting for another half an hour. That is a challenge. I do not want to take up any more time because I am conscious of other members. I could talk about this for a long time. I wish Ms Donnelly the best in everything she is doing. It is important to point out that there are needs for one-off houses for many people but maybe not for everybody who is getting them. Sometimes they might be better suited to being in a compact setting in a local village as opposed to in a one-off house remote from schools, pubs, shops, churches and so on. I thank the witnesses for all they are doing. I may get back come back in for a second round of questions. For the moment, however, I will move on to Deputy Martin Kenny, our newest member.

Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses for their presentation. I come from a rural constituency, namely, Sligo-Leitrim. To follow up on the Leas-Chathaoirleach's remarks on one-off rural housing, I live in a rural parish. We do not have a town. We have a small school, which was a three-teacher school five years ago, is now a two-teacher school, and will close in another five years, because we have an awful problem with rural depopulation. The next parish is Drumreilly, which has the same problem. The next parish after that is Gortletteragh, which has the same problem. While I understand that we need to have space for people to live in towns where they can have access to public transport, which we need to see happen, the towns in most areas of rural south Leitrim do not have public transport. Even if a person lives in one of those towns, he or she still needs a car. That is the reality. We need to look at this as a big picture. The big picture is that we have to get it right.

Regarding public transport, particularly in Dublin, Ms Donnelly mentioned the reduction in fares. When I get in the car to drive to Dublin, it costs about €10 per 100 km for fuel. A round trip of 150 km costs €30. If I get on the train, it costs me almost the same. That should not be the case. It should cost me less than half what it costs me to put fuel in the car if we are going in the right direction. That is just one example. It is similar for many people who live in Dublin and other urban areas. There is a public transport system but it is quite unreliable. My son has been living here for more than a year. He tells me that he goes to wait for the bus and the sign states it will be there in three minutes, then it changes to nine minutes, then back to three minutes. Twenty minutes later, he says, "To hell with this" and starts walking. Many people standing at the bus stops are saying the same.

One issue is that we have a population who have taken this on and want to do the right thing. Unfortunately, when they look to the right thing to do, they find that the service is not there for them. It might be the train from a rural area such as where I come from. When it costs as much to travel on the train as in the car, and three people can travel in the car, three people will not buy a train ticket for that price. That needs to be acknowledged. I am hesitant about free public transport. We need to be careful of that. People do not appreciate something if they do not have to pay for it. A cost-benefit analysis is needed to see where the sweet spot is in order that the price is right to attract more people to use the service and make it as viable as possible. We have to bite the bullet and recognise that we will have to subsidise many of these services to get people to use them. I would be interested in Ms Donnelly's comments on that.

The other issue I wanted to mention relates to EVs and charging points. Two times over the past number of years, I trialled electric cars. One problem I got was that when I got on the motorway and headed to Dublin, the on-board computer told me to do 400 km then get a charge. I quickly realised that it would hardly do 200 km when driving at speed and trying to get to the destination as one normally would in a normal car. There needs to be recognition that many people who are buying EVs are living in the cities and towns. The people who really need them, who are making longer journeys and are covering more kilometres are the people who live in rural areas. They are extremely expensive. For the vast majority of people on the average wage, to say they will have to spend €50,000 more on a car is simply way out of their reach. That is a big issue. Second-hand EVs have not come on the market yet.

Ms Marie Donnelly:

I thank Deputy Kenny. The Deputy is right that when EVs came on the market, they were very expensive. We can already see a trend in the market where EVs are approaching the same price as fossil fuel cars. In some instances, their price is dropping faster. It is a progression, and it will take time before it really manifests. Within the next three years, however, we will see equality of prices between EVs and fossil fuel cars. We know from the analysis we have done that the key issue is that many people in Ireland buy a second-hand car rather than a new car. Part of the policy here was to populate the market with EVs so that we would generate and support a second-hand market. That is starting to manifest now. That will allow people to buy a second-hand EV rather than a new one, which perhaps is more appropriate in the context of what they can afford in their budget. That is important. We see this happening across the board in Europe and beyond Europe, with the number of EVs rolling out globally, in the United States, China and the Far East. The issue there is key.

On the question of range, it is a challenge depending on the brand of the car. Most of the cars will have a stated range of 250 km or 300 km.

In an excess of caution, most people would not drive the full 300 miles and would seek to charge the car after travelling a shorter distance. The key issue here is that if people are driving from a rural area, like the Deputy going from Sligo to Dublin, they need to know whether they will have access to a publicly available fast-charging point. They need to know they can stop, have a cup of coffee and when they return, the car will be charged and they can continue their journey. This is one of the key issues that is being addressed as part of the roll-out of charging points.

People in rural communities are more likely than others to have the space to have a home charger. More and more people in the agricultural sector in rural Ireland are putting solar panels on the roofs of milking parlours, barns, sheds and so on, and generating power. That power can be used to charge their electric car, if they have one, on site. We are not suggesting that every farmer will have only electric cars. However, many farmers have more than one vehicle and one of them, perhaps the smaller one, could easily be electric. Those cars could be fuelled by the power that farmers generate themselves, which means they would, in effect, be powered for free. That is one of the areas the Climate Change Advisory Council is working on with both the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. We are trying to get the grant systems to work together in order to have an holistic approach in the rural environment to investing in the generation of electricity and then using it to heat the home with a heat pump, for example, and also potentially to power an electric vehicle.

We have not done any studies on the cost of travel by train. The Deputy makes a fair point in that regard. We should do an analysis of train costs in Ireland and how they compare with those in other parts of Europe. The Deputy is probably right that there should be a charge, but it is a question of finding the balancing point as to what charge would be sufficiently attractive for people to take the train, particularly for longer journeys, rather than taking the car. We certainly will look at undertaking that area of research over the coming months.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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The next speaker is Senator Doherty, who is taking Deputy Carey's slot.

Regina Doherty (Fine Gael)
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I thank Ms Donnelly for attending. I echo what Deputy Cathal Crowe said. We are privileged to have somebody of her calibre and dedication in post given the seriousness of the targets we need to meet. I really appreciate her input and guidance. I am a little sceptical in that I do not think we will reach the targets. I am not a pessimist by nature but I do just do not see that there has been the momentum in recent years to propel us to reach the 2030 goals. However, I am comforted by Ms Donnelly's confidence that she will guide us to those goals.

The point I wish to raise might seem an odd one because it relates to an issue that does not really come under Ms Donnelly's remit. In order to get people out of their cars and using their feet, cycling or even using buses, we must have an entire change of attitude towards how we share the roads. At the moment, motorised vehicles have absolute dominance. This is a concern not just because of the volume of emissions but because of the intimidatory way drivers, whether of buses, trucks or cars, treat people on bicycles and on foot. Have there been any interagency discussions as to how we can counter this negativity or superiority complex, which we probably all adopt once we get behind a wheel? It is an issue for the significant number of people who will not use bicycles on the roads and also for those who do.

I will give an example. There are three males in my family, namely, my husband and two sons, all of whom are cyclists. They are the type of cyclist who goes out on a Saturday morning and probably annoys people. There is a need for mutual respect among road users. We have been to our local Garda station on more occasions than I can say because of dangerous situations my husband has encountered coming home from work in Dublin to where we live in Ratoath. He has nearly been killed on numerous occasions. Both the Garda and the people who are at fault in such incidents show disdain for those who are trying either to stick up for themselves or protect themselves. On that basis, I will not allow my children to travel into Dublin city on their bikes. Their father is old and I worry enough about him. I would not let the two lads make that journey by bike.

When are we going to have an inter-agency conversation as to how we can change people's mentality? It is not just about assuming people are lazy and do not want to walk or cycle. Many people would do so if they were less afraid. We have seen the major changes in a number of European cities when people are encouraged to cycle. When I go to Amsterdam, Berlin or even Paris, it is safe to cycle because it has been arranged to be safe. There are problem drivers in those countries too, but they do not have the same access from a space perspective that drivers seem to have in our major cities.

I am totally on board with what Deputy Martin Kenny said regarding rural Ireland. People living in rural areas are not really cycling anywhere other than their local shop or school. There is this idea of everybody living with 1 km of public transport. How will that be facilitated in the medium term with a view to reaching our 2030 targets? I thank Ms Donnelly for engaging with us today.

Ms Marie Donnelly:

I thank the Senator for her questions. She pinpointed one of the areas that is most difficult to deal with, namely, people's sense of entitlement to use a car when, where and how they want to. That is the message we are communicating in our recommendation on road space allocation. It is not a popular message. We have seen that in the media when there is a suggestion either to put in a bus lane, take away parking at the side of a street or make a street one-way. People become very upset at such suggestions because they feel their privilege is being attacked. Part of what we need to do is illustrate to people that these types of changes lead to a better result. The Senator mentioned Amsterdam. There are traffic lights for cyclists there because cycling is so popular.

In Amsterdam, a decision was made to make the equivalent of the M50 one-way. That does not sound so bad but it means drivers have to think seriously before getting onto the ring road about where they are going to get off it. If they happen to be one stop ahead of where they want to get off, it means having to do the entire ring to get out. It is quite a simple change to bring forward and, where it is implemented, it has had a huge impact on the number of times people use their car and how often they will choose an active travel alternative. We do not have a full ring road in Dublin but we may need to consider clever ideas like that. It is not about saying to people they cannot have a car, because of course they can. Preferably, it will be a low-emission car rather than not. People can use their car and there will be times they absolutely need to do so. That is perfectly reasonable. However, let us think about the times they really do not need to use the car and about encouraging them to go for the alternative. That is really the message we are trying to put across at this stage.

There is something the Oireachtas already has done and which it might consider pushing a little further. In the Finance Act 2008, under section 18(b), provision was made for the levying of urban parking fees. The subsection states that where an employer provides workers with parking, that will be dealt with, not as benefit-in-kind because that has a specific meaning, but by way of a levy on the employer that is paid to Revenue. That provision is part of finance legislation as adopted by the Dáil and Seanad. It was introduced in section 18(b) of the Finance Act 2008 and it only needs a signature from the Minister for Finance to implement it. When it was introduced, there was quite a bit of resistance. The world was a different place in 2008. Now we have a very diverse workforce commuting into our cities. The levy would only apply in cities because there is public transport available there. We have a very diverse workforce coming into our cities and most people have the ability to work from home for two days a week or more, as the case may be. Some pro ratacomeback on the privilege of having a parking space should be considered.

If people want to use their cars, they can but maybe they should pay for it. That option is there and could be implemented very quickly by the Minister for Finance should he choose, because the Government has already agreed to it as part of the Finance Act.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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I am just wondering how it would work. If I have a free parking space in Leinster House that I do not use because I am on my bike, would I still get charged for it?

Ms Marie Donnelly:

No, you would not.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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We can work out the details if it ever gets implemented. I call Deputy Duncan Smith.

Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour)
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I thank Ms Donnelly for addressing us today. I would like to hear her thoughts on this matter. She mentioned the aviation sector. What is captured in our targets is domestic aviation flights. European flights are captured by the EU's emissions trading system, ETS. What are Ms Donnelly's thoughts on the debate around aviation in this country? This committee deals with aviation a great deal. I would like to separate the airports from the airlines for a moment. Each airport has its own growth pattern. They want to drive business to the airports Dublin Airport is our largest airport by a great margin because it is the national airport. It is on a voracious pattern of growth. It just wants more flights and is applying for planning permission to increase capacity with terminals and all the rest. The airports in Cork, Shannon and Knock are seeking to increase passenger numbers. Then we have the regional airports, which are making the case for their sustainability and continued existence. What is the council's view on the number of airports we have, what they say about how they need to grow and what that growth means? There is a debate around SAF within that sector. There is no SAF development on our island. I would appreciate it if we could set aside the SAF element for the purposes of my question.

I would love to be in a position whereby we could have free public transport. In order to facilitate this, the investment required to ensure that the public transport network infrastructure is of the highest standard would need to be in place. We are light years away from that. We have seen the example of Tallinn in Estonia. The authorities in Estonia introduced free public transport many years ago, but the investment in the bus fleet fell through the floor and they are having to row back on that. We welcome any reduction in the costs associated with public transport and want to see further reduced costs, but it is about finding the right point so we can continue to invest to ensure delivery of not only improved buses, electric buses, hydrogen buses, new rail, rail networks, MetroLink and the rest. I represent the Fingal constituency, which is located in suburban Dublin. One half of our constituency, including the third largest town in Ireland, Swords, has no rail network at all. Then there are the northern villages - or the rural villages, as we call them - like Naul, Oldtown and Ballyboughal, which would have similar bus services to those in Deputy Martin Kenny's or Deputy Cathal Crowe's constituency, where you might hope to get a bus on the hour if you are lucky or there might be a bus in the morning. There are massive gaps in our public transport provision. I ask Ms Donnelly to address both those points, but to start with her thoughts on aviation sector and how it is dealing with the issue of climate.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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Not to cut across the Deputy, because the aviation stuff is relevant, but just for clarification purposes, the transport ceilings exclude international aviation and marine but do include domestic aviation, which is quite small. It is only flights to Kerry and Donegal. In the longer term, aviation will obviously come into it. It is a very important question but our current targets are not affected by international aviation.

Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour)
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No, they are not. In noted that. However, Ms Donnelly mentioned aviation in broad terms.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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It is important because we live on an island.

Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour)
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Yes.

Ms Marie Donnelly:

I thank the Leas-Chathaoirleach for that clarification. He is absolutely right that aviation and marine emissions are not counted as part of our targets at that moment, although progressively they will be. To go back to the question about airports, the council does not have a view on growth. We are very positive about Irish society and the economy. If there is to be growth, very good, but it has to benefit everybody and it needs to be sustainable. To address the Deputy's specific question on airports, I would also extend it to ports because the emissions coming from airport sites and port sites are still very high. We already have technologies available for more sustainable airports and ports. When planes land, they will frequently continue to run their diesel engines either for air conditioning on the plane, powered lights or whatever the case may be. It is likewise with ships. When they dock, they will run their systems and power them by their diesel engines. What is proposed as part of the policy is that when a ship docks or a plane lands, it would link into the electricity system of the port or airport, which we hope will be decarbonised, and that will allow for a significant reduction in the airport's or port's emissions. These are entirely achievable objectives now with our existing technology. It just requires a change of practice by the management and operators of both airports and ports. That is one of the key elements in ensuring the sustainability of our airports going forward.

The council has never recommended free public transport. Our recommendation is to maintain the reduced fares. The Deputy is absolutely right that the analysis, studies and behavioural assessments that have been done have all shown that a charge is not necessarily a negative or a disadvantage in using public transport. Certainly, having reduced fares has proven to be an attractive feature and has increased our customer numbers on public transport. The Deputy is correct when he says that we need to get the balance right. It is also true that the financial demand for investment in our public transport system, be that in buses, rail or infrastructure supporting that, is very substantial. One of the issues we have identified is the roll-out of the soft infrastructure, that is, the routes and where to put DART+, the Cork commuter route or BusConnects, for example. All of these are subject to planning approval through our planning system. The speed at which the planning system is processing these is becoming a factor. It is a delay factor in terms of supporting the roll-out of the necessary improvements to our public transport system. The council is therefore very concerned about whether our planning system is sufficiently resourced, with both people and expertise, to be efficient and speedy in the processing of applications for strategic transport infrastructure such as the DART, BusConnects or a number of the improvements in the public transport system that are currently planned. The council is not suggesting zero cost for public transport. We are suggesting maintenance of the reduced fares with ongoing monitoring of their effectiveness. A key element is investment in improving our public transport system, both its availability and its expansion as necessary, in urban and rural spaces. The efficiency with which we can deliver that is a key element and one that needs to be addressed.

Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour)
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A joined-up approach to the pricing of public transport is vital. I will be travelling to Kerry next week and spending the day there. I have four options for getting there - car, bus, rail or plane. When I checked when planning the trip a couple weeks ago, the plane was the cheapest option. It was cheaper than rail, cheaper than fuel for the car would be and cheaper than the bus. That is absolutely crazy. I thank Ms Donnelly for coming before the committee today.

Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
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An Leas-Chathaoirleach had to leave the meeting to attend a vote. The next speaker will be Deputy O'Rourke.

Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein)
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I thank Ms Donnelly for her attendance. I will address a number of points and ask her to provide her reflections on the important opportunities that exist and the immediate actions the Government should take. There is potential for the reduction of emissions or a modal shift in the context of travel to school, incorporating school transport, such as bus transport, but also the Government's safe routes to school programme. It is a good programme but its roll-out and implementation is incredibly slow. Is there an opportunity to inject pace and scale to change the way trips to and from school are made?

I am not sure whether she is familiar with the Connecting Ireland programme, which is the Government's plan relating to regular daily journeys for populations numbering more than 300. It is a €56 million five-year programme and we are three years into it. The Government invested €5 million last year and spent €4 million. This year, it is investing €8 million but I am unsure whether that will be spent. Are there opportunities to improve in the context of that programme?

A slightly tangential matter that is, nevertheless, relevant to the committee is that ports are a key enabler in transport transition but certainly in the energy transition. What is Ms Donnelly's view in that regard? What type of changes are needed?

There is a heavy emphasis on public bus transport. Swathes of the country, particularly in rural areas, are without heavy rail. Could or should we be more ambitious in the expansion of new heavy rail services?

Ms Marie Donnelly:

I thank the Deputy for his questions. I will take the questions on safe routes to school and Connecting Ireland together. One of the concerns the council has, to which he has pointed, is that there are plans set out in the climate action plan, for example, but the speed of implementation and impact of the actions foreseen in the plans is very slow. Sometimes that can be understandable. If there is a need to change legislation, that can take time. If a policy is to be changed, for example, it is correct that a public consultation should be carried out so that people are aware of the change and have the opportunity to make their views known. If money is to be spent, the financial rules must be followed. Taking all that into account and accepting it, which we do, nonetheless, the pace of implementation of actions, not just in the transport space but more generally, is such that we are putting ourselves at a disadvantage in achieving our goals. The message the council has given consistently in recent years is that Ireland is good at doing plans and has set them out clearly and we understand the policy and, for the most part, agree with it, but the speed of implementation is too slow. For the two programmes to which the Deputy referred, we need those who are going to benefit to be much more vocal and active in saying they want this and they want it now. That is an area on which I agree with him. First, we need that people understand it is available and, second, to say they want it now. There is a need to get the activity moving faster than before.

As regards ports, the issue has been in newspapers recently. The Deputy is correct that ports will become a significant part of the economy going forward, especially in the energy space. We are looking at offshore wind coming on track on the east coast in the coming years and potentially on the south and west coasts in very large quantities, given the area of sea basin within our national waters. The natural resource is there. Members are probably aware of the North Sea summit that took place earlier this week. Ireland has the potential to be a major battery of energy for the rest of Europe. This will be a very important resource, one that we need to maximise to our benefit but also the benefit of Europe. To do that, we will need ports that can deal with the size of ships and wind turbines, for example, that will be integral to harvesting that natural resource. I visited some of them in Denmark when I was working for the Commission. I saw the offshore wind turbines and the port facilities. In Denmark, for the most part the length of piers in ports had to be at least doubled to take these enormous wind turbines. I was in Killybegs last year and saw a number of wind turbines on the pier. Those turbines are huge but they are small in comparison with the scale of the turbines that are coming down the track. The Deputy is correct. A planned approach to the development of ports is a key issue. It is national infrastructure that we will have to develop to get the benefit of the natural resource we have offshore.

On rail, only a tiny percentage - 2% or 3% - of industrial goods are transported by rail in this country. It is probably the lowest percentage in the European Union. We have a challenge. Can we maximise more the existing rail structure to transport more goods? Part of that is about operational efficiencies. We will have to consider investment in rail for certain hubs where we can benefit from the transport of goods through industrial rail connections to these large ports that will ultimately be developed, for example. We have many challenges right now in rail in terms of the investment. The ports plan needs to be devised now because we need to start and rail will come as an integral part of that as we go forward.

Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
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I welcome Ms Donnelly. It is good to see her again. Deputy O'Rourke did not mention it but he and I were in Amsterdam and Utrecht in the Netherlands at the weekend. We were on a tour with the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action to look at cycling infrastructure but also to discuss green hydrogen and the circular economy with stakeholders there. It is a parallel universe over there, as Ms Donnelly will be aware, in terms of what they have done in the past 40 or 50 years. It is important to note that back in the 1970s the Netherlands had a chronic situation with cars on the roads. Approximately 800 children were killed on the roads in the Netherlands in 1972 and that led to a very successful campaign set up by doctors known as Stop Killing Children. It led to a total shift in policy in the Netherlands such that many shorter journeys are now made by bike. I encourage all colleagues to travel to the Netherlands to see how successful it has been in that regard. We can be successful as well. We do not need to wait 40 years; we can learn from the Netherlands.

I refer to the avoid, shift and improve framework.

The report the CCAC commissioned from the OECD that was published in October is a very good report. It stated that at the time Ireland's policy approach was really heavy on the electric vehicle potential and then pushing EVs. It stated that would not work because all that does is to reinforce the car-oriented system of transport that we have. There is a concern there. There are overtures to the avoid, shift, improve framework in the 2023 climate action plan, but we are not properly embracing it. The emissions cuts that would come from the various improved measures are the third priority. Avoid, shift, improve is a hierarchy with avoid the most important, shift the second most important and then improve, which relates to the EV piece. However, 60% of the emissions cuts we would get by 2030 would be on the improve side and so I do not think we are quite there yet. I have a concern that our approach to EVs will reinforce to some extent the car-oriented transport system we have. I would be interested to hear Ms Donnelly's comments on that.

Regarding SUVs, many electric vehicles are SUVs. I found out lately that 99% of all new vehicles sold in this country are larger in terms of their cross-sectional area than the Volkswagen Passat, which was a typical family saloon car back in the 1980s. That is quite staggering. In old photos of any street in the country, the cars look quite dinky when compared with photos from today. They are creating huge problems. We can fit fewer SUVs, which is a problem in itself. There is the safety issue, of course. There is also count against the emissions savings. Even if we are at 80% renewable electricity by 2030, which will be very difficult to achieve, we will still be at 20% fossil fuel-generated electricity, so the 2 tonne vehicle will use much more energy and create more emissions than should be the case. On EV policy, there needs to be a push towards lighter and smaller vehicles. There is nothing in our policy at the moment to push in that direction. I would be interested in Ms Donnelly's views on how we can address that because we will not meet our climate targets if all our EVs are 2 tonne or 2.2 tonne SUVs. That is critical.

Have I more time?

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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I think the Deputy has managed to use his entire five minutes on that, leaving no time for responses but I will let him back in.

Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
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I am sorry about that.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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I will let Ms Donnelly respond to that. On that same point about heavier vehicles, I saw an article in recent days about multistorey car parks potentially having to be strengthened because-----

Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
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The weight of SUVs

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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-----all these cars have heavy batteries and 2 tonne vehicles meaning that multistorey car parks cannot physically take the weight of the cars going into them.

Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
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I think I lost a bit of time because of that audio issue. I would like to ask one final question of Ms Donnelly. While we have EV policies, we do not yet have policies on scrappage of fossil fuel vehicles. If we are simply adding EVs to the existing number of vehicles, we will not get a reduction in emissions.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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Because of issues with the mic, Ms Donnelly might not have heard me. There is talk of cars being bigger and heavier, particularly with the weight of batteries and so on. Multistorey car parks may not be able to cope. They may need to be strengthened or reduce the number of vehicles permitted to enter. It is not a secret that I have quite an old Volkswagen Golf. It is relatively small and does me perfectly well but I am not trying to bring five children to five different places. It seems that cars have got bigger and heavier. The point that Deputy Leddin made about avoid and shift is much more important. EVs will certainly ensure better air quality but they will still take up space on roads.

Ms Marie Donnelly:

The Deputy is absolutely right about the avoid, shift and improve. Avoid is really down to spatial planning. If people are living in a situation where they can access the services, they can use active transport and active mechanisms, that is the 15- or 20-minute city, town or village as the case may be. That avoids the necessity for emissions in transport. The "shift" is of course out of private cars and into more public buses, trains or whatever. The "improve" is to improve the technology involving things like electric vehicles and biofuels in transport to reduce emissions in the system there.

One of the very legitimate points the OECD made in its study was that our initial policy was focused on the number of EVs we were going to have in the country as if that was enough to produce a solution when in fact it is not. The Deputy is absolutely right. We are talking about 1 million EVs and if we still keep the 2 million fossil fuel cars, we just end up with 3 million vehicles on the road meaning that congestion is much worse, air quality does not improve and certainly our emissions do not improve. The key issue is to substitute the fossil fuel vehicles with electric vehicles but at a reduced level. We need to go from the 2.2 million cars we have to a lower number; it obviously is not a fixed number. The key issue is to give people an alternative. Many households have two cars and some might even have three. What is the possibility of going from two cars to one car? That would lead to a 50% reduction which is quite dramatic and has a real impact. It does not deprive people of a car; it does not stop them using the car. It is just having one car instead of two cars. It is just a question. We may need to think about it and look at it in more detail.

The Deputy is absolutely right about the size of the car. Almost 50% of our cars are of the SUV type, heavy duty cars with very high levels of in-body carbon. They are very heavy cars even leaving aside the weight of the battery. It is not sure that we actually need cars of that size. Certainly not all our cars need to be of that size. One of the questions we have been asking is: what is the policy on advertising cars? How many times do television adverts for cars, particularly larger cars, feature the car stuck in traffic? That is where a car spends most of its time. They tend to show the car on the open road or on an empty street. It has the road to itself and it is wonderful. One wonders how misleading the advertising even for cars is. This is not just an Irish problem; it is a general problem across the western and developed world.

The council's position is that our taxation system through the excise duty and vehicle registration tax applied should reflect the carbon emissions of vehicles. We have said that before and that is our position on that.

On scrappage, we have done some analysis on the fleet in Ireland. Our ownership of cars is at or about the European average. The age of our cars is also at or about the European average. It is not as though we have a particularly old fleet. At ten or 12 years the fleet is at the European average. The question of scrappage will become much more relevant as we move towards 2035. It will not just be an Irish problem. As the Deputy will know, it has now been voted in Europe that the internal combustion engine from 2035 cannot emit emissions, which effectively finishes their commercialisation in Europe from 2035.

The whole of Europe is going to be confronted with the reality of a car market that is going to have to shift slowly, progressively, but more rapidly the closer we get to 2035. We will need policies for that, and we will need innovation for it because thinking about just scrapping all of the cars and putting them in a pile in the corner is not a solution. Similarly, we are now beginning to realise that buildings, rather than knocking them down and starting again, should be valued, the embodied carbon retained, and the house revalued, renovated or upgraded as the case may be. This is a better opportunity than just scrapping it.

Not just in Ireland, but more generally we are going to have to think about what we are going to do with the vehicles that are on the market for which people will not be able to find buyers. If someone has a fossil fuel car that is six years old - just for the sake of discussion - in 2033, to whom is he or she going to sell the car? That is a real question we have to think about, and the consequences of the decision that has now been taken in Europe and that will apply to Ireland as well. That will have an impact on our car stock, car market and car ownership going forward. At the moment, the council has not done any studies on that, but it is certainly an area around which we have started to have a conversation.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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I thank Ms Donnelly, and Deputy Leddin. We have the time to have a second round for members who are still interested in having a second round. As it happens, Deputy Cathal Crowe is not here, so I am the first.

I will put a few points Ms Donnelly a few points, and she might respond to them. Regarding the production of fossil fuel cars versus their sale, can people still sell second-hand cars after 2035? Will they be able to keep their car for as long as it keeps going, but not be able to sell it on DoneDeal or the second-hand market, or transfer it to a relative? Is it their own until it falls apart? Can they repurpose a fossil fuel vehicle into a battery vehicle, or is it more trouble than it is worth? Certainly, if my car is 15 years old and it is doing approximately 4,000 km a year, I would have thought I would use an awful lot less energy by keeping that on the road than I would by scrapping it, demolishing it and then using all the energy required to produce a new car, electric or otherwise.

She might take on board the point I made about insurance. At the moment, people can drive their own car. They are insured on their own car. They may not be able to drive other people's cars, depending on their policy. They might like to go other places and use other cars. At the moment, the up-front cost is getting the car. It is now sitting in the driveway. People pay their annual insurance. The marginal cost is the fuel. If people were doing the GoCar type model, they might get rid of their cars but I think people do not want to lose their insurance track record because if they ever get a job where they might have to have a car, they have to start from scratch and perhaps pay double or treble on their insurance.

A lot of the barriers I find towards cycling is not so much the shower element or whatever, but the security at the other end. If I bring my bike into town, will I know it is still there if I go to the cinema or a restaurant? We do not have enough secure bicycle parking areas. There are places where I think it will probably be okay, and there are places where I am fairly sure it will not be. A lot more needs to be done on that aspect of it. There are big bike parks in the Netherlands and other places where people can put them in, and they know, 99.9% of the time, that they are going to get them back. The amount of glass on the roads is huge, and it is only when one is cycling that one sees it. We need to do an awful lot more in improving the street sweeping. They are swept once a week but if the glass is broken in the morning or afternoon after the sweeper has been there, we could be stuck with it for a week.

The GoCar model has a lot of potential. I am not that familiar with it. I had not cycled in probably 20 years until ten years ago. I was on Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. I was asked to get involved and become the cycling champion. That did not mean I was any good at it; it just meant I was to promote it. However, it changed my way of thinking, and every motorist should nearly be asked to cycle to see what it is like to be a cyclist on the road. I drive; I will drive and I need to drive sometimes, but I know that a lot of people who do not cycle feel a bit envious of all these bicycles flying past them. Then they get a bit annoyed when the bike is, possibly, avoiding a light or something like that. They are not the problem, however. We do not think about pedestrians in that way, and maybe bicycles are the most vulnerable after pedestrians on the road. They need, sometimes, to get ahead of a 40 ft container truck.

I agree with the point made by Deputy Leddin regarding the Netherlands. I was in The Hague just before Covid-19, and they were showing us photographs of what The Hague looked like in the 1970s, when there were cars absolutely everywhere. Almost nobody seemed to drive in the core of The Hague. I am sure there were some outside the core. However, if there was a bigger core, it would make it much more pleasant to cycle in. I had to go down across the quays earlier to speak at an event in the CHQ building, and I was able to cycle down on a bike through a load of areas that are very uncongested. However, as I was cycling back, there were cars everywhere queuing, and I was able to move much faster.

We need to do an awful lot. It may mean something like allowing people to be given bikes - sign up for a bike, and one is given a bike for six months. There may be a tracker on it to see how often it is used. The more people use them, maybe they get them at a reduced price, so long as one keeps using it, and I mean using it for normal, day-to-day trips. I am not necessarily saying it is to cycle up the mountains on a Sunday. There is no problem with that, but it is to eliminate the trips that we are doing in cars. That benefits every driver too. The more cyclists that are on the road, the less cars there are on the road. This will suit the older people, who are perhaps not as fit as they used to be and not in a position to. We must remember that not everybody can cycle, but an awful lot of people who may not think they can, can actually cycle.

They are just a few of my thoughts. They are more to take away, and go back to Government to bang the drum with it. We can say lots of things in here, but Ms Donnelly and the witnesses certainly come with all their apparatus and standing. We are very lucky to have them, which was a point made earlier. By all means come back on my thoughts, but I want her to be conscious that there are barriers to people cycling. The more barriers we can eliminate, the more modal shift we will get. That relieves pressure on the public transport system and the roads, and it is far cheaper for people to be on bikes and far healthier for them as well. We need more Luas lines, but we would not need as many and as much capacity if more people were cycling.

Ms Marie Donnelly:

I would like to clarify that 2035 is the date by which the manufacturers of cars have to achieve zero emissions from the cars they put on the market. It is a provision that applies to the manufacturers of cars, rather than to individuals.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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So second-hand cars can still be traded?

Ms Marie Donnelly:

Of course, yes. If one has a fossil fuel car, yes, one can still drive it, one should be able to get insurance for it, one can sell it. If one can find a petrol station that still exists by that stage one can "tank it up", as the case may be, with petrol or diesel. It must be remembered that the difficulty we have with charging and the insufficiency of electric vehicle, EV charging points now is likely to go in reverse for fossil fuel stations going into the future. As the number of fossil fuel cars diminishes, so too will the services supporting them. We are likely to see an inversion of the pattern there. This is a provision that affects the manufacturers of cars, not the individual owners of cars. People have time to think about the car in that context.

On converting the existing fossil fuel cars to electric, I know that there are some companies which do that, but they tend to do it for vintage cars and that type of car. Regarding a wholesale basis, quite honestly, we have not looked at that in the council. I cannot comment as to whether it makes sense or not. I know that the number of pieces that go into an EV car are approximately 1,000 units less than what goes into a fossil fuel car. However, that is about as far as my knowledge goes on that. I am afraid I will have to get an expert to come in and give the committee more detail on it. Somebody gave me that piece of information.

On insurance, I have written to Insurance Ireland, because one of the concerns the council has is around commuting.

People are spending many hours a day in their car going to and from work. It is one person per car. One of the suggestions we are making to employers, for example, is to facilitate car sharing among their workforce. This might mean slightly changing the time people start work, putting a buddy system in operation, etc. One of the questions that came up was around the insurance implications for the person who is driving the car. We have written to the insurance association about that. The letter, which is on our website, confirms that there are no negative impacts on the insurance of the driver in a car buddy system like that.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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That is a slightly different point from the one I was making. My point was that if there are four cars in a household and it decides to reduce that number to two, two of those drivers will then become named drivers on other people's policies. They will not have to insure themselves in the way they did before but they will lose their no-claims bonus, etc. This creates an incentive to keep the car, even where they do not drive it much, and a deterrent to getting rid of it because the minute people stop having a vehicle, they lose their record as an individual driver.

Ms Marie Donnelly:

That is a very valid point. As the Chair will know, I was in Brussels for many years. When I came back it was impossible for me to transfer my no-claims bonus from Brussels to Ireland.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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Ms Donnelly feels the pain I am suggesting.

Ms Marie Donnelly:

I am making a note here. We will send a letter to the insurance industry asking for clarification on its position and what it is proposing to do about it.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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Deputy Leddin wants to comment specifically on that point.

Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
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I gave up my car a number of years ago and I do not drive any more. I use GoCar and I find it very useful. On the no-claims bonus, people will have two years' grace with the insurance companies. I suggest that people give this a go, maybe park the car up for a few weeks or months and see how they can get about without it. They may find that it is easier than they think.

Ms Marie Donnelly:

The point on parking for bikes is a very valid one. As far as I am aware, we do not have the kinds of parking facilities that are needed. I am sorry to go back to this issue but we see this in other parts of Europe where there is two-storey parking for bicycles at shopping outlets, stores, government offices and hospitals. Provision is made for secure parking of bicycles because there is an automated lock on the biking. It is interesting to see two-storey bicycle parking facilities. That would respond to some of the concerns raised. As I said, it is not really relevant in Ireland because I have not seen it here but it could be easily brought in here.

Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
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Ms Donnelly mentioned the issue of having enough EV chargers motorways. Is there an issue with capacity? The owner of a filling station told me some time ago that they were looking to get these chargers in but the power supplier had a limit on the number of stations it could install because the network did not have sufficient capacity to provide them. When someone with an EV wants to get it recharged, they find in many places that the charger either does not work when they arrive - that problem is less frequent now than it was a couple of years ago - or there are more people queuing to charge their EV because there are more electric cars. Instead of it taking 20 minutes to recharge, they end up waiting an hour and 20 minutes and another 20 minutes to get their vehicle charged. That is a real problem for people.

I want to mention an issue that brings us back to the real issue, which was spoken about earlier. I am thinking about an individual in my part of the world who is undergoing cancer treatment in Galway. He lives in a rural area but does not have a car and does not drive. There is no rail service for him to go from Galway to Sligo. The western rail corridor is not operational.

The development of population in Ireland has been centred on Dublin. In most other countries, there are large cities half or three quarters the size of Dublin at the other end of the country. There may be two or three of them and there is movement between them. Here, everything either goes to or comes back from Dublin. That is the issue. If somebody from Sligo wants to go to Limerick or Cork, he or she has to go to Dublin first and then to Cork. That is ridiculous. We need alternative routes and transport corridors, other than those that simply go to the capital and back.

Ms Donnelly mentioned that we need to get more traffic moving via rail, rather than moving bulk transport with trucks. I visited Dublin Port recently. It has a rail terminal but much of the freight is moved in containers on trucks. It tells me - this is part of the point I was making with regard to everything being in the city - that 70% of the containers that come in are delivered within 90 km of Dublin. This means there is not much point in having a rail line that goes somewhere else when most of it will actually end up back in distribution centres that are in or close to Dublin. How can we identify what products are suitable to be delivered or transported by rail, particularly if they have to go a long journey on the island? How do we try to co-ordinate that properly so our ports are able to deliver?

Ms Marie Donnelly:

I will address the issue of trains to Dublin and the geographic placement of our cities, urban centres and population centres. Many people in Cork may feel it is a big urban centre, so we do have these centres in Ireland. The Deputy is right, however, that we tend to operate a spoke system with our public transport. Earlier in the discussion, the question arose regarding why we are putting so much emphasis on bus rather than rail. Part of the reason is that buses can travel on our roads and we already have our road network in place, whereas we do not necessarily have the rail network in place for all the places we would like to have rail. That is a challenge and part of the NTA's plan is to reinforce rural connections, support people to get from the places they are in to the places they need to be in a more efficient way. It is rolling out a number of very interesting pathway projects in that regard, which will allow much greater flexibility than has been the case previously. We are starting to see the numbers increase as a consequence.

On capacity for EV charging, the Deputy is quite right; it is a matter of the number and speeds of the chargers. That will ultimately link back to our electricity supply and grid. From there, it is only half a step to the issues around whether we can roll out the generation and grid infrastructure that are necessary to make that power available fast enough, given some of the delays we currently have. I go back to the point about planning that I made in terms of transport infrastructure.

On the ports, the Deputy asked a more question on freight transport. Freight transport in Ireland is a particular challenge and the Climate Change Advisory Council is commissioning some research on it. We are looking at the whole question of consolidation centres and operational and digital efficiency of the transport system. We have a situation with small- and medium-sized freight transport - it applies to containers to a lesser extent - where a van that is half full may be going from here to the city centre, another one is coming in another way and they all converge in the centre of the city. Should we be looking at consolidation centres to minimise the number of smaller freight transport journeys into our cities? This would benefit the transport system, which is congested in our cities.

Digital efficiency is another area.

We can make use of so many apps that are coming out now. We all know what it is like to buy online. The goods are delivered the next day and the delivery driver comes from wherever it is with one parcel to the locality. Surely there could be greater coherence across the mechanisms of delivery in order that there would not have to be individual trucks with individual deliveries of individual parcels. That is one of the areas we are looking at on the council as part of the research we are undertaking.

Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein)
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I thank Ms Donnelly for her contribution. In regard to park-and-ride facilities and the opportunity they present, there are examples around Dublin and the other cities. In trying to accommodate people, there may be an opportunity, arising from having an expanded park-and-ride network. Would Ms Donnelly agree?

Other members spoke about SUVs. This challenge was discussed last week by the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, and Trinity College Dublin. We tax vehicles based on emissions and we hope to get to a place with zero-emissions vehicles in the not-too-distant future. Does Ms Donnelly have a perspective on how a future regime that would also incentivise people to use appropriate transport modes as much as possible might look?

Turning to mobility as a service, a number of members mentioned GoCar and at least one producer also has a shared-ride scheme in Dublin city. Does Ms Donnelly see an opportunity in that? Does she think that is, for want of a better term, the direction of travel within transport, whereby a Leap-style card could be used on various forms of transport?

Related to that, as Deputy Leddin said, we visited Utrecht and Amsterdam as a committee at the weekend. Those cities have severe capacity constraints on parking given the number of bikes in public spaces, while high-powered electric bikes are also a challenge because of their speed and power, as are e-scooters. As I understand it, they are not allowed in the cities, and they have been banned in Paris. We are quite a way down the road towards regulating for them. Does Ms Donnelly have a perspective on their use? We do not yet have wide experience of them, yet other places that do are reviewing or reconsidering their use and taking various approaches.

Ms Marie Donnelly:

On park-and-ride, the Deputy is correct, although I might take it even a further step forward. We absolutely need more of it, but we also need more parking capacity at our train stations. If we want people to take trains, we should facilitate them travelling a short distance perhaps by car followed by a train journey. I take the train regularly and it can be challenging to find a parking space anywhere near the station, so people tend to be pushed back in that regard. This is about joined-up thinking to get people out of their cars in a way that is realistic for them. I would fully support the Deputy on that.

On SUVs, the council, in its recommendations last year, called specifically for the vehicle registration tax, VRT, to take account of both resource and energy efficiency. The Deputy is quite right; the embodied energy and the weight of the car would be reflected in the VRT charged for the car.

GoCar is new and is happening in other cities, and the same is true of shared bikes. We have them to a small extent in, for example, Dublin, but city bikes that people can take or leave by using an app are very popular. There is huge demand for them and they are very well utilised in cities where they are in place. I gather that in Dublin, they are limited to the area within the canals, so perhaps that could be widened. As Dublin is, relatively speaking, a flat city, it lends itself to their use. Some of our other cities are a little more hilly and, therefore, it might be challenging there. Nevertheless, people will use them. It is the convenience. The Leas-Chathaoirleach suggested everybody could be given a bike but, in a way, this would give everybody a bike where and when they need one.

As for e-bikes and e-scooters, the real issue relates to ensuring both the safety of the users and the speed at which they can travel. For the most part, these bikes are linked with an app, so GPS can control the speed. Doing that would make sense, given excessive speed is not safe. Moreover, in some other cities I have seen, city scooters come with a helmet. It probably makes sense, for safety reasons given the speed at which users are likely to travel, to wear a helmet when using these vehicles. These are just experiences I have seen in other cities that seem to make sense.

Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
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If I heard Ms Donnelly correctly on the tax approach for heavier vehicles, including electric vehicles, she would favour a regime that reflected the true energy efficiency. That would incentivise lighter and smaller vehicles, which would be welcome.

To return to the scrappage issue, I was not so much getting at the physical challenge of scrapping a lot of fossil fuel vehicles. Rather, it was about our 2030 emissions challenge if we do not displace fossil fuel vehicles but simply add electric vehicles to the car fleet. Notwithstanding that we might not have the highest rate of car ownership in Europe, our emissions profile is closely linked to the number of fossil fuel vehicles on our roads at the moment. If the policy is not to scrap them, for want of a better word, but to displace them, I do not see how we are going to meet the carbon budgets or the 2030 challenge, and that is true of the tax question as well. Unless we have a focused, meaningful tax regime with respect to the weight and possibly even the size of vehicles, given there is an aerodynamic impact from larger vehicles, which makes them less energy efficient, I do not see how we are going to get to that 50% cut by 2030.

On the park-and-ride issue, it was interesting to see in the Netherlands at the weekend that the planners there said it had a place, but a much smaller place than many people might think. If anything, the reason to provide it is almost political, whereby it is provided in order that people can use it and the service can be said to be available. That was the experience in the Netherlands. Utrecht provided a number of the facilities around the suburbs. In terms of capacity, cars are big, so not many can fit into a lot of these park-and-ride facilities. They are essentially multi-storey car parks. One of them, which has 2,000 spaces, cost €85 million to build. The planners said it had been the right thing to do, but it had been dwarfed in capacity by the city's rail and bike systems. I tend to agree. I think there is a place for them, but not perhaps in as significant a way as others do.

I am also interested in the policy on parking. Generally, the more we provide parking, the more we induce driving, so we have to be very careful that we have good policies around parking such that we are not getting that lock-in or that reinforcing of the car-orientated system that the OECD spoke about.

Ms Marie Donnelly:

I want to wrap up with a more general approach to the comments the Deputy has raised, both in terms of taxation and what is our policy on scrappage in its widest sense. Ultimately, what we have to achieve is demand reduction in transport, which is part and parcel of the policies. It is an area currently being developed further and it is the one that we absolutely need to achieve. It is one that will deliver initial reductions, which is what we are particularly interested in, but it will also deliver a service to the community and our society. Some of that is by facilitation. We need to make public transport available, we need to make safe cycling lanes available and we need to have pleasant pedestrian walks available so people will make those choices because they will be the obvious and logical choices to make.

There will also be a necessity, shall we say, for push-pull. I would go back to the parking comment that I made earlier. The Finance Act provided for a levy for urban parking, but it was never implemented and I am not sure why. For people who have a car park available to them as part of their job, while it varies, of course, on average that is €20 a day, €100 a week or €5,000 a year. We are not saying we should take the car away from people but if they are getting €5,000 a year of parking, it is not an outrageous suggestion to say they should pay a levy for that parking, and that funding should be used to further invest in the alternative options that are available. It is a choice. It is a push-pull mechanism. It is one that is already on the books in our system in Ireland and it just needs to be implemented.

I go back to my earlier comment. We have plans and the plans are good. We talk about actions that will deliver results. The difficulty we have is that we are not sanctioning those actions fast enough. We have to be much faster in implementing and rolling out the plans we are talking about. We need to take things from paper and put them into reality as quickly as possible. That is the urgency that we face. That is the only way we will stay within the carbon budget both for 2025 and, ultimately, for 2030 and beyond.

Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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I look forward to Ms Donnelly coming back to us in the not-too-distant distant future to share with us how we are getting on. We need to take a lot of bold steps. We need to make a huge jump in how we all weigh up every single journey we take and whether there is a better way of doing it. Ideally, it would be a more sustainable way and also cheaper. If the train is much cheaper than the car, we will use the train, and if the train is much more expensive than the car, it will make sense for a lot of people to continue using their car. The more we can do on public transport fares and capacity, the better. It needs to be more of a carrot than a stick approach, although I accept that sticks are sometimes needed.

By and large, we need to incentivise people to shift. I think that if many people did shift, they would ask themselves why they did not do it years ago. You can get around a lot faster in most of the city of Dublin on a bike than in a car. Certainly within the canals, and probably within a 5 km or 6 km radius of the city centre, you will move around a lot faster and it is a lot drier than people might think. We have a lot to do to get people to even try that. If they tried it, they would quite like it, but many people are very reluctant to even try it. I might have been one of those people a long time ago but I have jumped, and if I can do it, anyone can do it.

I thank Ms Donnelly for all she is doing and wish her well. If there are barriers or things she feels she needs to bring to our attention, I encourage her to write to the committee, to me or to any of the members to say what she needs. The more attention the Climate Change Advisory Council brings to it, and the more people are talking about it, the more likely we are to get change that will benefit everybody. It is important that we realise there is much more benefit to this than anything to be scared of.

We will adjourn. The next meeting of the joint committee is a private meeting on MS Teams at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, 9 May.

Ms Marie Donnelly:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to present today.