Verona Murphy (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is fair to say that with the €3 billion the Government collects, what the Minister really did was head off to COP and sign us up to targets that we could never meet. We face fines of between €3 billion and €8 billion as a result. The Minister will be long gone into the sunset when that occurs. The hardship he has caused people who have bought electric vehicles is pretty dismal. They bought them in good faith that the Minister would put the infrastructure in place, having given them a very small partial grant, and that infrastructure is not in place. Now many face the position where they cannot trade those cars because they have halved in value. The car dealers are not able to sell them and therefore cannot take them in, so we are left in a position where the Minister wrote to Ursula von der Leyen to make up for his mistake. He wrote to her on 7 October, along with some other ministers in the EU, and asked her to take advantage of the corporate fleet, those who have a car for work and get benefit-in-kind. He is asking her to look at that and, as he put it, to tap into it. The potential, however, currently remains untapped. The Minister now wants to force the EU to correct his mistake and bring in some further imposition where he lacked the capability to put the infrastructure in place to deal with the electric car market. He put the cart before the horse and now people are left footing the bill.

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