Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It simply beggars belief. I am sorry. I am again going to say that I admire the Minister's hopes and ambitions, but at some point policy will have to be grounded in the reality of where we are. I do not have a problem with electric vehicles, but I do have a problem with forcing cars off the road. There are very few charging points in rural Ireland even now. A bigger problem, however, is that most people in this House, for example, would drive perhaps 50,000 km annually. I see Deputy Michael Healy-Rae here and perhaps he, or Deputies Daly or O'Rourke, might concur with me. Many people would drive that distance. Most electric vehicles now have a lifespan of a maximum, I would have thought, of 250,000 km, or at least that is what I was told at the briefing by representatives of the Society of the Irish Motor Industry, SIMI.

Therefore, we have electric vehicles with a lifespan of five years, at which point they must be replaced. They will be recycled, but a great deal of energy is involved in recycling vehicles. Electric vehicles are fine for a certain cohort of the population. If we are to have 1 million electric vehicles operating by 2030, however, has anyone thought of where the required energy is going to come from? We are eight years away from 2030. Do we have a plan? We are struggling to fuel the State this winter, while we are intending to have 1 million electric vehicles by 2030. Where is the required electricity going to come from? I am serious about this point.

I am not deriding the idea, the hope and the ambition in this regard. Only last year, Equinor pulled out of the Irish wind energy market because, apparently, there was a complete lack of ambition to bring in the regulatory and planning reforms required. Today, representatives of the wind energy sector told us no ports in the Republic of Ireland have the necessary capacity to facilitate the development of the mammoth offshore developments that will be needed if we are going to harness wind energy on the scale required to provide all this electricity.

We have no ports, no regulatory structures, no planning structures and an office tasked with getting 1 million electric vehicles by 2030. Is there to be an office tasked with training pigs to fly by 2030? I am genuinely baffled by the disconnect between where we are at and where we hope to get. It seems the Government is continuing on blithely unaware of that. Unfortunately, I do not see the plans to tackle that.

I accept it might be possible. I accept that Ardnacrusha went from conception to being commissioned and fuelling the energy needs of the State in the time period the Minister is talking about, which is eight years, but I simply do not see any sign of anything like that happening today. On that basis, this amendment is as useful as an amendment providing for pigs driving cars or pigs flying and the absolute necessity to regulate that. On that basis, I must oppose the amendment.

See this speech in context