Professor Hannah Daly:

I thank Senator Pauline O'Reilly and agree there is now a really high urgency to enact measures to meet our sectoral carbon budgets. There is a very high risk that if we overshoot our sectoral emissions ceilings, it will not be possible to make those up at a later date because the remaining sectoral carbon budgets after 2030 really need to be reserved for those very hard-to-abate sectors; sectors where there is no mitigation option right now. It is clear there are mitigation options right now for passenger car transport. My opinion is that the justification for buying new fossil fuel-powered vehicles is dwindling very significantly. The Senator rightly pointed out that some people need a certain type of vehicle for their work and that should be protected, of course. However, many people buying new cars buy fossil fuel cars. Maybe they think they will replace them in three years' time or something with a battery electric vehicle but that new fossil fuel car stays on the market and will emit dozens of tonnes of CO2 over its lifetime. Then there will be fewer new or second-hand EVs on the second-hand car market in the future.

I do not want to propose a set of policies to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuel cars and away from heavier cars. However, I would certainly point to an increase in the progressive VRT bands on CO2 emissions and to adding weight as a component to VRT both for fossil fuel and electric cars, as well as a number of softer measures including announcing the phasing out of fossil fuel cars in the cities in the future, in the 2030s, and to measures to tackle tolling and parking. If we think about how we regulated smoking, there was a big transformation within our lifetimes, in that it was normal to smoke indoors and then through a range of public health information measures, regulation and taxation, as well as information campaigns, that sort of mindset has completely shifted now. We no longer smoke inside. The framing of that was not really around that smoking is bad or that people were bad for smoking. It was around protecting vulnerable workers. At the time that Ireland brought in the smoking ban in pubs, people thought it would be impossible and that it would be very unpopular politically. It took a lot of political bravery to drive that through and it was framed around protecting vulnerable workers.

We need the same type of framing of how we think about the future car market. This is not about SUV bashing, this is about protecting vulnerable road users. I gave evidence as to the fact that the number of children walking and cycling to school has really plummeted since the 1980s, since we started tracking it in the census, as the number of children being driven to school and college has quadrupled. It is not that parents are to blame. Parents are just doing what they need to do to protect their children. They often buy a bigger car in order to justifiably protect their children. That makes sense from an individual perspective but by not providing walking and cycling facilities or safe routes to school, the State is not providing a global optimum solution where children can safely walk and cycle to school any more. The same argument can be made for the increasing size, especially the bonnet height and road space taken, by increasingly larger cars. I will leave it there, thank you.