Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I support the amendment we have tabled. The motion from the Rural Independent Group is born out of frustration with where we are now and what is going on. It gives us an opportunity to highlight some deficiencies. For example, the national retrofitting scheme has been announced but it is not happening. The national broadband plan is in place but it is not going at the speed it should if we want to keep people in their own localities, working locally, saving on cars on the road and on energy.

We should enact the wind energy development guidelines that were signed off in June 2017 and have not been implemented. We should enact microgeneration payback for people who invested money and put the panels onto their houses with an express intention they would be paid for any excess electricity going into the grid from 1 July last year. To date they have received nothing. They do not even know how much energy is going back out to the grid because it has not been metered. It is a complete kick in the backside for anybody who decided to do anything about changing their lifestyle. They were told to invest, they invested and now they are getting nothing back. The contract is broken. This is part of what is wrong with the agenda we have for climate action. The contracts are being broken left, right and centre. What we have left is people who are taking up the slack for inaction.

We need to make sure transport modes are changed so that people can use a train. The western rail corridor is there to be opened. We have to have another review of it when we could be transporting people into Galway city through a very clean form of transport rather than having Claregalway stuffed with 30,000 to 40,000 cars per day. We wonder why we are not meeting our targets.

The electric vehicle charging infrastructure in this country is a joke. I know of two people who bought electric cars and have sold them again because they cannot rely on the public infrastructure that is there. That is an indictment of what we promise, what we say should be done and how we are going to have this great vision to bring Ireland into a green, renewable economy. We have everything but we have nothing. The motion on offshore renewable energy we brought in last December should be enacted. We should take it on. It was agreed by everybody.

The biggest frustration people have is they are enduring additional costs, including in my own constituency of Galway East, to go to work and bring their children to school. They have to use their cars. They do not have public transport. The school transport system is a joke at times. They pass people by and do not bring them to school. They prefer to see parents coming out in the car and bringing them to school, clogging up the outside of the school, burning more fossil fuels and creating more demand for it, which is leading to a motion such as the one before us. We have announcement after announcement from the Government. We do not have any plan or implementation strategy for them. Therefore we have no action on the plans and announcements the Government makes. We are here today and we have no results. I commend our motion to the House and hope Deputies will support it.

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