Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is not doing enough. We are not being ambitious enough. We are not thinking big enough. The sum of €1.5 million will not cut it. The climate figures being announced today are shocking in respect of how this State, this Government and the previous Government in particular have abandoned ambition. We are not thinking big enough and not thinking into the future. In my constituency, most people will not have a driveway and will not be able to charge at home. In many parts of this country as well as in my constituency, we need to create charging spaces that the public can use.

If the budget is only €1.5 million, one of the ways it could be done is to require petrol stations, starting with a certain size, to have a charging point. Supermarkets would also have to have charging points. They would benefit from it. Municipal car parks, which are making a fortune in this city, would also have to have charging points. That regulatory system brings us back to what we were talking about earlier. Industry, or even supermarkets, for instance, would bear the cost but would benefit from attracting customers.

We need to do this quickly. Our emissions are rising and there is no reduction in sight into the next decade. We have a massive gap between what we, rightly, have committed to do within the European Union and the direction in which the EPA says we are going. Everything has to change. There has to be a quantum leap in the scale of response. It should start with electric vehicles because they comprise a better system. They are better cars, they are cleaner for asthma and other health reasons, and they use our own fuel rather than fuel from Saudi Arabia or Russia. It is win-win-win. It will only happen, however, when the State leads and on a scale ten or 20 times the present response.

See this speech in context