Mr. Michael O'Leary:

I disagree fundamentally with the Deputy on his first point. Going around St. Stephen's Green, it is clearly not cars that are the problem. There is one lane for cars going around the green. When I was going to college in the early 1980s - admittedly, as my children would say, that was the last bloody century - there were four lanes of traffic going around St. Stephen's Green. There is now one lane for cars and one lane for bicycles. There are not that many bicycles in the cycle lane. I went out the Rock Road to Blackrock Clinic recently. There is one lane of traffic on the road, which is one of the main arteries in and out of Dublin, and one cycle lane with not a bicycle on it.

There is no way we will have a liveable city 20 years from now when we are building all the houses outside the M50 and expecting people to commute in and out of Dublin. Public transport will not serve those diverse communities. Some communities will be served, including those in Maynooth, for instance, and elsewhere in Kildare. Ultimately, however, we need to make it easy and affordable for people to drive in and out of town. That requires more traffic lanes, fewer cycle lanes and much more car parking. The quays are a good example. In my day, there were four lanes along the quays, one for car parking and three for traffic. We are now down to one lane of traffic, two taxi lanes, for which I am very grateful as I get to fly up and down the quays in one of them, and one cycle lane. The functioning lungs of Dublin are the quays and St. Stephen's Green. We need to loosen them up and make them work. They are not working at the moment.

We have a huge problem in regard to SAF. We have already signed up to supply agreements on SAF for about 10% of our fuel needs by 2030. We have set a target for ourselves to get to approximately 12.5%. The European mandate is 6%. Ireland has no SAF. This country is the beneficiary of about €250 million a year in ETS tax revenues that are returned to the Government. It is one of the issues we have raised. I gave a copy of our submission on it to the committee. In a letter we wrote to the Minister, Deputy Ryan, we pointed out that Ireland received €163 million in ETS revenues in 2023, which were mainly from Ryanair passengers. That revenue will grow to €240 million in 2024. The Government is using that income, wrongly, in my view, to subsidise and fund the school bus fleet. I have no issue with the school bus fleet but it comes under the budget of the Department of Education.

I have asked the Minister why he is not using that ETS revenue to incentivise and, if needs be, subsidise the oil majors, who are the only people who will produce SAF in Ireland. He is focused on storing SAF in Shannon Airport, where there apparently are three big tanks under the runway. They are no good to us there. We need to have SAF at Dublin, Cork and Shannon airports. SAF production is being subsidised and incentivised by the Dutch, Austrian, German and French Governments. Our Government is one of the few in Europe that is not incentivising the production of SAF at home. Unless we start doing that, we will have no SAF in this country in 2030, when Ryanair and the other airlines would want to buy SAF and uplift its usage here. This is another gap and failure in our transport policy under the Minister. It is an issue he should be on top of. The Green Party loves talking about SAF but when it comes to delivering it in this country, it has no policy at all.