Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

The membership of the taskforce will include persons from the Departments of Transport, Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Environment, Heritage and Local Government and Finance, from Enterprise Ireland, the IDA, Sustainable Energy Ireland and agencies such as the ESB which has already set out a significant amount of work in this area. It will continue work that has already been done by Sustainable Energy Ireland, including visits by officials from the agency to Denmark and Israel.

I disagree with Deputy Coveney on the issue of targets. I believe the target is pitched exactly right. It takes time for any country to turn its fleet over to electric power. Any cars bought today will still be on the road in ten years' time. In looking at what other countries are doing, we set ourselves at the top level with such countries as Denmark and Israel, recognising that they also are only at the starting phase in this. No country has yet deployed the infrastructure needed to support a wide electric fleet. This work is starting and it will take a number of years for car companies and the infrastructure-building companies to deploy the infrastructure. I believe that in this regard the target we set ourselves is at the right level.

Targets are not limits to our ambition in this instance. We must reduce our dependence on oil and the transport sector is the biggest user of oil. If we can exceed that target, then certainly I shall be more ambitious and push beyond it. However, given where the technology is at present and where other countries are, it is the right target for us. It allows us to work with those countries — Israel, Denmark and Portugal in particular — and with the international car companies and our infrastructure providers, to provide a scale that makes the development of electrical vehicles commercially viable more quickly.

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