Dáil debates

Thursday, 16 June 2022

Emissions in the Transport Sector Report: Motion

 

4:45 pm

Photo of Brian LeddinBrian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
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I move:

That Dáil Éireann shall take note of the Report of the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action entitled "Report on Reducing Emissions in the Transport Sector by 51% by 2030", copies of which were laid before Dáil Éireann on 11th June, 2021.

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Heydon, for joining us here today for this very important debate. The report we are discussing in the House today was published a year ago. I had a query from a journalist as to why it is being debated in the Dáil now and what is new with the report. While I do not claim to understand the dark arts of Dáil scheduling and what gets selected for debate and what does not, I can say that this report is more relevant now than it was a year ago and that it is likely to be more relevant still in a year's time because, until such time as we cut emissions in the transport sector by a full 50% or more, this report will have immense value and can be our guiding light on that journey.

At the beginning of last year, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action, which had just finished pre-legislative scrutiny of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2021 and proposed that a target of a 51% reduction in emissions by 2030 be knitted into the new law, decided to undertake a methodical examination of the big emitting sectors in the Irish economy, those being transport, agriculture, energy generation and heat. We are here today to discuss the result of one segment of that portfolio of work, that on emissions in the transport sector.

Before I begin to lay out what is in this report and why it is important, I will thank the members of the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action for their hard work and for their efforts in putting together the report. In time, it will be seen as a landmark report that helped our State to undertake the systemic change in transport that was required to meet our climate targets and to meaningfully contribute to the immense global effort to reduce all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, in doing so saving this precious ecosystem called earth for our children and their children and making it a better and fairer place to live.

I also thank the expert witnesses and guests who appeared before our committee: Dr Tadhg O’Mahony, Finland Futures Research Centre; Mr. Niall Cussen, the Planning Regulator; Mr. Andrew Murphy of Transport and Environment; Ms Anne Graham, the chief executive of the National Transport Authority; Mr. Hugh Creegan, also of the National Transport Authority; Dr. Brian Caulfield of Trinity College; Dr. Diarmuid Torney of Dublin City University; Dr. Lynn Sloam of Transport for Quality of Life in Wales; Dr. Elisabeth Windisch of the International Transport Forum at the OECD; and Professor Alan McKinnon of Kühne Logistics University in Hamburg. We held one of those sessions in this Chamber during the Covid lockdown and I had a chance to sit in the Acting Chair's seat and play at being Ceann Comhairle for a few hours. That was certainly one of the highlights of my political career to date.

The committee's report makes 47 recommendations and points the way towards achieving the necessary reduction in transport emissions through a fundamental change in how we plan and manage the transport system in Ireland. Over the course of the engagements, it was made abundantly clear that to do this the "avoid, shift, improve" approach must be embedded in our transport and mobility infrastructure planning. Reducing transport demand must be the first and key priority, followed by shifting carbon-intensive journeys to zero-carbon modes such as walking and cycling and providing sustainable public transport in both rural and urban areas. The electrification of our public transport and freight fleet is the necessary third step, followed by the electrification of private vehicles. This report challenges the conventional "predict and provide" approach and the legacy of poor planning that has induced traffic and car dependency and driven road construction and high greenhouse gas emissions, resulting in adverse consequences for our economy, our health, our society and our environment.

In the following few minutes, I will address some of the key findings and recommendations of our report. We heard that we have enough road space in all of our urban areas but that we use it very poorly, which has had a disastrous effect on many of our towns, particularly those in rural Ireland. It has also led to a society that is car-dependent, which results in high levels of carbon emissions. While it is tempting to give space to private cars for access to shops and for parking and while it is counterintuitive to do otherwise, this tends to be a very inefficient way of enabling the movement of a lot of people. In other words, a small number of cars carrying a small number of people will clog up a street, having the effect of putting a low limit on the number of people who can and will use it. For social, health and economic reasons, road space should be prioritised for modes of transport that are cleaner and that more people use such as public transport, walking and cycling. If we design our streets for cars, we will get cars. This is what has been happening for the past 60 or 70 years. However, if we design our streets for people and for more efficient and cleaner modes of transport, this is what we will get.

What flows from road space reallocation, as challenging and unpopular as it might be, is an effective reduction in the capacity of our roads to carry private cars. We need to do this if we are to achieve the necessary cut in emissions, while also availing of a plethora of co-benefits. The approach of the past that economic growth, population growth and traffic congestion demand the development of more roads was mistaken and must be thrown out. In this regard, the committee recommends a review of current and planned road projects.

At this point, I will make a personal observation. This is not something the committee has said. We seem to have an absurd system whereby State transport agencies have tens, if not hundreds, of road projects in the early stages of planning at any one time. Hundreds of millions are spent every year to keep this project pipeline ticking over. Many of them will ultimately fall at the planning stage, will not be prioritised for further funding at a later stage in the process or will be required to be scrapped by our climate obligations. The bill for this pipeline of fantasy roads will come to many billions of euros. It is my view that we should stop now, as our near neighbour Wales has done. We should stand up to the highway industrial complex, save ourselves vast amounts of resources and redirect those resources and our energies towards more meaningful and beneficial infrastructural projects and services.

If we agree that we must reallocate road space and, in so doing, reduce the car-carrying capacity of our roads, a good way to get the ball rolling would be to introduce a car mileage reduction target. Such a target is proposed in last October's climate action plan but it is a low target of just 10% and only applies to fossil fuel-powered cars. Not applying the target to all cars means that we are implicitly accepting that we could end up with more cars on our roads driving more kilometres in 2030 than is currently the case. If we are to be consistent with an approach of avoid, shift and improve and with the policies of modal shifting, reallocating road space and reducing the car-carrying capacity of the network, we should apply this target to the total number of vehicles, including electric vehicles, as Scotland has done in the last 18 months or so.

The approach of avoid, shift and improve, which transport policy should follow, does not present electric vehicles as a panacea to the issue of emissions in the transport sector. There are still a lot of emissions associated with electric vehicles, including greenhouse gas emissions, very harmful particulates and other pollutants.

EV supports should primarily help those caught in forced car dependency. Accordingly, the committee recommends that a car mileage reduction target be introduced. We have intentionally not been prescriptive in saying that it should just apply to fossil fuels. Additionally, the committee recommends that incentives and supports for EV uptake should be reviewed and targeted, with a particular focus on forced car usage.

We need to look at how we make investment cases for infrastructure. We need to tackle three flaws in the public investment process as it relates to climate change, namely, how we calculate benefits, the data we collect to demonstrate potential benefits, and our post-approval assessment procedures. On the benefits, for too long we have relied on easy-to-calculate benefits such as travel time for roads projects, yet we have ignored the social cost of dispersed housing, polluted air and greenhouse gas emissions. We have been making investment cases based on flawed assumptions from the 1970s that ignore climate change, combat growth and the potential for transit-oriented development, and ignore everything that we have learned in the past 50 years. The data we collect and model when we propose new infrastructure is also flawed, in my opinion. For the past 30 years we have proposed motorway projects that have consistently underestimated the volume of traffic that will be removed from bypass roads and the induced demand of new traffic that occurs when a new road is built. We could fix some of this relatively easily by adopting a practice from the UK of post-approval assessments examining its impact after infrastructure has been built and how the impact compares to projections. This is done routinely in the UK. A witness who appeared before the committee, Dr. Lynn Sloman, was able to use the data to prove a significant carbon impact from greenhouse gas emissions is caused by the UK's road-building programme. Another witness, Dr. Tadhg O'Mahony, sent some follow-up information to the committee after appearing before it. He stated

For projects with long-term environmental effects, such as those related to air pollution, climate change and ecosystem damages, it is recommended to use timescales of 100+ years for economic evaluation of the impact. Failing to fully capture these long-term welfare gains and losses will distort analysis with a bias towards those projects that are more carbon-intensive, or environmentally damaging. Such a bias would undermine not only the evaluation, but welfare and sustainable development in general.

The committee has set out strong recommendations in respect of how infrastructure projects are appraised.

We need to give our rural communities a transport guarantee. The essence of the "every village, every hour" approach is that every community has a bus service that operates every hour, from early morning until late at night, connecting in with services on the rail network where they exist. This level of service has been proven to work in rural Switzerland, in parts of Germany and in the UK. If rural communities are provided with good services, they will make the switch. In small rural towns such as Schaffhausen in Switzerland, more than 40% of journeys are taken by public transport. That compares with just 5% in my home city of Limerick, despite the fact that Schaffhausen is smaller and has a lower population density than Limerick. It is not just a climate issue, but a social justice issue. A significant number of people in rural Ireland do not own a car. Many more experience what research from Dr. Páraic Carroll of University College Dublin and Dr. Brian Caulfield and Dr. Rodolfo Benevenuto of Trinity College Dublin call forced car dependency, where people in rural areas are forced to own a car, even though they cannot afford one. Research done in my own office indicates that serving all 850 settlements in Ireland seven days a week, 16 times a day would cost approximately €500 million a year without taking into account fare revenue. In Schaffhausen in Switzerland, fare revenue contributes to half the cost of providing the service.

Private cars in Ireland drove a total of 35 billion km in 2019. If we levied a small charge of just 1.5 cent per kilometre on both fossil fuel and electric private cars, it would fund the every village, every hour service in its entirety. Even if all these new buses were diesel buses, the greenhouse gas emissions would still be very small. We could offer rural communities a real alternative to the car and give people a real opportunity to reduce their transport emissions, no matter where they live. A recent study from University College Cork, UCC, showed that 37% of all our transport emissions are caused by private cars that are undertaking short journeys within the 0 km to 8 km range. There is no doubt that many, or even most, of those car journeys can be displaced by the use of bikes, particularly electric bikes. However, it cannot, and will not, happen until we have full connected, cohesive and safe cycling networks in and between all our urban areas. If we are serious about tackling the 37% of emissions caused by private cars, we will quickly roll out such networks. We can do this at very low cost as we have seen with successful projects in Dublin along the quays and in Dún Laoghaire on the coastal mobility route. The report strongly recommended that the NTA's regional transport strategies align with the national ambition to cut emissions by 50% within a decade. It is with regret that a year after the report's publication, we see that the draft strategies for Dublin, Limerick and Waterford fall well short of this ambition. The potential for electric bikes to fulfil our mobility needs has not been adequately modelled in the development of these strategies. If it was done, the shortfall in emissions reductions could be made up.

Lastly, on climate action, the members of the joint committee have noticed that we are very good at talking about climate action among ourselves, and the necessary policies, regulations and legislation that are required. We are good at talking about it as politicians, as sectoral interests and as academics. However, we still need to bring the people with us on this hugely challenging that journey that we are on. The committee has worked very collaboratively and I pay tribute to all members for their work. We have set very high and ambitious targets. However, it is increasingly clear that even modest climate action measures such as the development of cycle lanes, the removal of electricity pylons or the improvement of waste policy, let alone any of the recommendations of the report, are easily politicised and exploited. In this regard, the committee recommends that a concerted public awareness campaign is undertaken to inform the public on climate action and address concerns. We feel that this would neutralise the opportunity of some individuals to play politics.

I could go on and I could talk at length about the contents of the committee's report. I encourage all Members of the Houses to read it. It contains some very interesting testimony from the witnesses who appeared before the committee on how we can reduce our transport emissions in Ireland by 51% by 2030, and how we can do it in way that is fair, that fulfils the needs of everybody to get around in a timely fashion and in a healthy and a safe way. I am just about out of time, so I will leave it at that. I look forward to the debate and listening to the views of colleagues across the House.

4:55 pm

Photo of Martin HeydonMartin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael)
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The Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications sends his apologies as he is unable to be with us today. On his behalf, I wish to thank and express an appreciation to Deputy Leddin, members of the committee and the various stakeholders who met with the committee, for their work and leadership in developing this comprehensive report. This report is an important distillation of complex analysis that both sets out the scale of the challenge in transport succinctly and points the way to how we can together achieve a reduction in transport emissions.

It is clear that the scale of the decarbonisation challenge for transport is not to be underestimated and will involve fundamental behavioural changes to how we all live and travel. In emissions terms, the climate action plan has outlined a reduction range of 42% to 50% for the transport sector, a reduction of up to 6 megatonnes from the current level of 12 megatonnes. As legislators and public representatives, we have a responsibility to provide the leadership that will be required to deliver on the climate action that we have committed to. I understand that the Minister's Department is addressing many of the key themes and recommendations from the committee's report, which I will go through in turn, but I will first note some key points of progress since the publication of this report last June.

In the past year, there has been strong progress on climate action. The Government has put in place robust new governance structures, underpinned by the signing into law of the Climate and Low-Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021 last July, and which have since been followed by the adoption of the carbon budget programme by the Houses of the Oireachtas in April of this year. The Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications is currently in discussion with all relevant Departments regarding the setting of forthcoming sectoral emissions ceilings that will be required to deliver on our carbon budget programme, and expects to be able to bring proposals to Government in the near future. These sectoral ceilings will set a maximum limit on emissions for each sector of the economy in each of the two five-year periods to 2030, and this year’s update to our climate action plan will be the first that will take these mandatory sectoral emissions ceilings into account. Last week, the Government also published its progress report on the delivery status of the 423 climate action plan measures that were due for delivery in quarter 4 of 2021 and quarter 1 of 2022. Transport accounted for 54 of these measures and had an "on schedule" delivery rate of 69%, demonstrating that while good progress has been made on key impactful actions, we can still further accelerate the delivery of measures with real abatement impact.

Returning to the content and key themes of the committee's report, which I note adopted the key avoid, shift, improve framework to transport decarbonisation, likewise, I can provide the following update on the behalf of the Minister and the Department.

The first of the key themes highlighted in the committee's report is the importance of avoiding the need for travel and reducing transport. Delivery of the national planning framework, NPF, objectives is being supported through better transport planning and investment. The revised national development plan published in October 2021 and the national investment framework for transport in Ireland, NIFTI, subsequently published by the Department in December 2021, set out the key principles and the lens through which further transport projects will be assessed. Through NIFTI, the Department has established its priorities for transport investment and has set out modal and intervention hierarchies that project sponsors will be required to consider, prioritising active travel and public transport over the use of private vehicles. These principles and hierarchies are intended to support the delivery of the NPF objectives and avoid urban sprawl, and instead deliver compact growth through more targeted investments, such as supporting smaller bypasses of regional town centres, prioritising space for active travel and public transport, and by providing proper integration of transport and planning.

I note that we have also seen as a result of the pandemic the potential role for remote working in reducing the overall need for transport and the benefits of a place-based approach to development that prioritises well-being.

Committing to these measures and ensuring that our metropolitan area transport strategies incorporate these transport-oriented and place-based principles will bring real benefits both in the rejuvenation of our urban and rural centres and also in the delivery of real emissions impact through reducing transport demand. This also ties in crucially with the shift principle in getting people to shift to more suitable and sustainable alternatives.

Key developments in sustainable mobility here since the committee’s report include the publication of the new national sustainable mobility policy, SMP, in April of this year, and its associated suite of actions, which aim to deliver at least 500,000 additional daily active travel and public transport journeys. This includes our programme for Government commitment on the reallocation of capital funding, with a 2:1 ratio of new spending for sustainable transport schemes to roads and an unprecedented €360 million annually for active travel projects. These commitments have been complemented by the recent 50% reduction in public transport fares for young people and the wider 20% reduction in public transport fares that will help to make public transport more attractive.

The SMP covers a wide range of areas encompassing infrastructural delivery, enhancements to public transport services, integration with planning and development policies and a host of other initiatives that will support the toolkit of demand management measures that were identified in the Five Cities Demand Management report and help achieve a minimum 10% reduction in kilometres driven by fossil fuelled cars by 2030.

To oversee and accelerate delivery of these actions, a leadership group has been established which includes representatives from the National Transport Authority, NTA, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, the regional assemblies, the City and County Management Association and the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. In addition, the leadership group has made nominations to a delivery team whose role is to identify and oversee the delivery of a series of pathfinder projects and initiatives which can serve as exemplars for sustainable mobility projects across the country.

Other key sustainable transport projects, beyond the headline projects of BusConnects, DART+ and Metrolink that colleagues will be aware of, include, for example, significant improvements to the Cork area commuter rail programme. This is a €185 million investment in Cork’s rail infrastructure to enable the later electrification of the network. On a national and all-island basis, the ongoing strategic rail review is also examining the potential future role and use of our rail network.

We are also very conscious of the need to connect people and places in rural areas and are continuing to expand public transport measures for dispersed communities to an appropriate level of service. Funding for Local Link services has been increased to €28.3 million in 2022 and has enabled the introduction of 90 new routes, improvements to demand responsive services and several evening services.

Our Connecting Ireland rural mobility programme also aims to increase public transport connectivity for people living outside the major cities and towns, increasing service levels by 25% and providing 70% of people in rural Ireland with access to public transport. Some of these routes are already being accelerated as part of Government’s response to increased pressures on services where the local population has grown in response to the Ukrainian crisis. This acceleration of works will include additional stops, route modifications and more services with the aim of increasing connectivity.

Turning to the improve principle, electrification and biofuels, we are looking to the electrification of our private, commercial and public transport fleets and the use of renewable fuels in transport. In terms of electric vehicles, EVs, our climate action plan targets are ambitious with a target of 195,000 private and light goods EVs on the road by 2025 and 940,000 by 2030. As of the end of May 2022, we currently have just over 60,000 battery or plug-in hybrid EVs registered on Irish roads, of which 30,000 are fully electric. Unfortunately, I note there have been shocks and headwinds arising in the supply of EVs as a result of global supply issues with certain components and because of the Russian war in Ukraine. The Department is closely monitoring these delays for potential impact on our CAP targets.

Following on from the recent public consultation on our EV charging infrastructure strategy, the Department of Transport will also establish Zero Emission Vehicles Ireland, ZEVI, as a new office based within Department of Transport in the coming weeks. ZEVI will bring a number of policy and delivery functions together in one office with a single focus to enable delivery of EV targets for CAP. It will draw on skills and experience from the Department, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, and TII, with input from the NTA and the ESB, further developing our policy and strategy for EVs in Ireland, providing grants and supports for EV purchases and supporting the installation of EV charging infrastructure.

On Monday, the Minister and the NTA also announced the signing of a framework agreement for the purchase and manufacture of 800 electric buses which will initially be rolled out in Dublin and Limerick and work is continuing to electrify commuter rail lines.

On completion of the DART+ programme, the amount of electrified track in the greater Dublin area will be trebled. In December 2021, the Government approved the preliminary business case for the DART+ programme and specifically approved the purchase of 95 new carriages, 65 of which are battery-electric and 30 of which are electric units. These new carriages are expected to enter service in 2025.

I note that the Department published its policy statement on renewable fuels for transport in November of last year and has recently concluded a public consultation on the policy statement. As a transitionary measure, biofuels are expected to deliver in excess of 1 Mt of emissions abatement by 2030 and the policy statement sets out a clear trajectory for the use of bioethanol and biodiesel to 2030.

As part of the annual climate action plan process, the Department will continue to look to identify additional measures to meet the transport sector’s gap to target and at how any additional measures can be introduced in a manner that supports a just transition. While we now have the key policies and strategies in place, we must now start to address the scale of transformation required. There have been some exemplary schemes that demonstrate the potential and vision we are trying to achieve, such as the coastal mobility route in Dún Laoghaire and recent pedestrianisation of Capel Street, but we recognise change is not easy. All of us need to ensure that we communicate the benefits of these schemes to our communities so that we can achieve the behavioural shift and improved well-being I think we all want to see.

I concur with the points made earlier by Deputy Leddin about the importance of bringing people with us and having a clear communication strategy. In our ambition to bring about significant change, we must consult with the people. We must explain to people the ideas and strategies behind the intention and show them the benefits of it, where we can. We must also be mindful that without the people with us, we will not deliver on the ambitions we want to.

I again thank the committee for its work and for tabling this motion. I look forward to the rest of the debate.

5:05 pm

Photo of Darren O'RourkeDarren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein)
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I welcome the opportunity to speak on this motion and report. I thank the previous speakers, the Chair and the Minister of State for being here. I also thank the witnesses, the committee secretariat and the committee members for their input to the process.

We know that the current emissions situation is not good. After a fall in emissions in 2020, we are back to business as usual and our national emissions are rising. Total greenhouse gas emissions are estimated to have increased by 6% in 2021. They did not decrease as is required in the carbon budgets. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has said those emissions are not likely to fall this year either. In fact, they are more likely to increase.

Transport has been cited by the Minister as one of the more difficult areas in which to reduce emissions. That is why I think this report is particularly important. It touches on many areas. There are many opportunities if the right approach is taken.

I welcome the reduction in public transport fares that were introduced earlier this year. This report examined public transport in detail and explored what else we could do to get people out of private cars and onto buses and trains.

Recommendation 22 proposes that a free public transport system should be costed as an option to encourage the uptake of public transport in Ireland. In response to this recommendation, I asked the Minister in January if he would examine it. He referred the matter to the NTA. The response from the authority was that it does not have a work programme for examining the provision of free public transport because this is not currently an objective of the Government's public transport policy.

There is a balance to be struck in respect of these issues in terms of the capital and current investment in the delivery of services and a reduction in fares. Obviously, in any comprehensive and attractive public transport system, availability and affordability are very important factors. We need to continue on the road of expanding services while also ensuring that fares are not driving people away. We need to continue the expansion of services and BusConnects was mentioned in that context. At the very least, in light of the current cost-of-living crisis, we need to see a continuation of the 20% fare reduction and examine how that might be expanded. Is there anything more that could be done on the youth travel card? Perhaps we could build on that because we are beginning to see the benefits of those reduced fares. We also need to include private operators in these schemes. The reality is that we have a blended mix of public transport provision and I am concerned that we might run ourselves off the edge of a cliff by not adequately supporting private operators.

The climate action plan sets out a target of 1 million EVs on our roads by 2030. The transition away from diesel and petrol cars will deliver significant emissions reductions. EVs are not the solution everywhere. There are more attractive alternatives, especially in urban areas. We have to be realistic about our spatial distribution of settlements, however, and EVs will have an important role to play. That said, the EV schemes that this State has designed and delivered over the years are offensive. They represent a massive transfer of wealth. In terms of the policy objective, what we want to achieve in the first instance is getting those people who are dependent on cars or vans into EVs. They are the people we want in these vehicles but they are the last people who will be in them. The Government's EV subsidy scheme is a massive transfer of wealth, with very expensive vehicles being bought. That has decreased somewhat but has not gone far enough. The figures for the EVs bought under the scheme in the last year reveal that 5,391 vehicles purchased cost in excess of €50,000. In contrast, just 53 grants were provided for vehicles costing less than €30,000. One does not need to be a genius to work out who is availing of these grant and the sort of advantage they already have before any transaction takes place.

I will again make the case that the Government needs to explore the opportunity of a second-hand EV market. Brexit is a factor in this in terms of the impact of the British market being closed off. There are ideas within the second-hand EV market in Ireland to address that and they need to be considered. We also need to consider the commercial sector, in particular the van market. People are going to be driving vans into the future because they do not have a public transport alternative so we need an EV scheme for them too. The Department is considering options in that regard but it needs to move quickly. The fundamental piece involves bringing people with us. People can see the current scheme for exactly what is, which is one that advantages the already advantaged and that understandably annoys them.

I also want to raise the issue of taxis, which are an essential part of our transport network. Again, I am deeply concerned that we are at risk of running off the edge of a cliff at the end of this year with the ten-year rule. It is a massive problem for taxi drivers. The rule means that older cars have to be replaced when they get to a certain age. A total of 5,344 vehicles in the taxi fleet will reach their maximum age in 2023. There is a real risk that those vehicles will be taken out of the system and we will have a crisis within the taxi sector. There is also a risk that the taxi drivers who are in a position to change their cars will replace them with petrol and diesel cars, even though those vehicles do not really need to be replaced, because they cannot get EVs because of the supply chain issues. The transition to an electric taxi fleet could be managed better if we extend the ten-year rule.

I have already referred to rural transport. On transport infrastructure projects, the Navan rail line needs to be delivered, as does MetroLink and the western rail corridor. These are significant investments. School transport is a low-hanging fruit opportunity. That the State is denying children the opportunity to take public transport to school outside of 5 km or outside of walking distance is unforgivable. The school bus scheme needs to be expanded.

In haulage, there is an impasse and it is frustrating to watch. It is really important that the Minister engage with the industry and listens to its views on the types of solutions that can and will work. I get frustrated when I hear about impasses and a lack of willingness to engage. That needs to be addressed. I know there is an ongoing review of our ports policy. We need to avail of opportunities to maximise the potential of our ports in the context of the green economy more broadly. We must also reduce emissions in our ports.

Active travel presents significant opportunities. In response to a point made by Deputy Leddin, this is a politically contested arena and we need to recognise that. Of course some people will play games with it and for a lot of people this is not priority number one. In that context, it is about showing leadership and showing people how this stuff works. It is about designing schemes that are not inherently inequitable and that do not put people's noses out of joint straight away. People need to see the opportunities in active travel. They need to see that it will work for them. We need to show them positive examples, and the Minister of State mentioned a number of them earlier.

Time is of the essence. We need to look at rolling this stuff out rapidly and at scale. We need to look at the planning system and how to do that but, ultimately, we must engage with people and design schemes that work for them. It can be done.

5:15 pm

Photo of Steven MatthewsSteven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party)
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I commend the committee and the members of it who are in the Chamber on another excellent report. The output from the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action, chaired by Deputy Leddin, is exceptional. We each have ten minutes to talk about transport and planning but we would need hours. In fact, Deputy Leddin and I have spent hours talking about transport planning. We have often ruined a good social occasion for many people by spending hours talking about how we are going to fix the transport problems in this country.

We cannot talk about transport without talking about the planning system. We have had decades of urban sprawl and it is really difficult to retrofit our transport system to meet decades of sprawling development which has locked people into car dependency. In the early days of the BusConnects programme, councillors, roads engineers, local authority staff, community groups and others were invited by the NTA to an information session in the Royal Marine Hotel in Dún Laoghaire.

We were broken into break-out groups and provided with maps of a sprawling urban district. We were given a limited number of buses and a limited number of drivers, and we were told to design a public transport system for that city with its sprawl. It could not be done. No matter what way one tried to jig it, some people were going to be left unserved by public transport. That is the real challenge we have. How do we provide public transport that is viable and competitive, and especially when we have spent 40 or 50 years just providing for cars? Planning policy has created that.

Page 8 of the report refers to the Office of the Planning Regulator: "...the OPR does not currently have adequate tools to monitor and assess the progress of developments on brownfield and infill sites and urged the Committee to recommend the establishment of a Brownfield Register in order to address this issue." I will take this recommendation back to the housing committee because I believe this is something we need to look at under the planning system. How do we know that the objectives of our national planning framework are being met if we cannot really measure and monitor properly? This then feeds into how we provide transport systems.

With regard to vacancy and dereliction, while we sprawled in how we built, we took our eye off the towns. We have let the towns die a little bit and become hollowed out. We need to refocus that. I believe there is general consensus that we need to look at those vacant and derelict buildings. By revitalising the towns and bringing buildings back to residential use, it allows us to provide those public transport systems. It is not only about public transport systems to the towns, but it is also about how people circulate and get around the towns. These are the active travel measures that Deputy O'Rourke referred to.

We still design in a way that puts priority on the car. This creates hostile streets. Even in the way we design housing estates now, one must get into a car to get out of the estate. There are really easy ways to knock a hole through a wall and put in a pedestrian linkage through with safe routes to schools where people can cycle and walk and meet their friends from the other has estates quite easily. There are, however, massive objections from people when one tries to go back and retrofit this measure. I was dealing with one such situation in my constituency recently where people on one side of the wall wanted it and those on the other side of the wall did not. It is always contentious. We must start building this type of measure into how we design.

We have a load of roads in this country. One could build a really good political career just on a love of roads. We have often seen political careers built on this, where one could spend five years lobbying for a road, another five to ten years funding it and getting it built. Then one would get another five years out of widening it, and in the intervening 20 years it would also need to be fixed multiple times. We must get away from that. Building a big, brand-new shiny road is not development. It is 1990s transport planning thinking and it shows that we do not understand the climate emergency and how much of the emissions are due to transport because of the way that we designed and built our developments. It can definitely be done, but we must develop a different love for the road and embrace a design that is safer for children and pedestrians, where our towns and villages welcome people walking or cycling to school and where parents and guardians can bring children to school in a safe manner and not have to make the decision as to whether they should load the kids into the car because there is no other safe way to get there. It is fine for urban areas, and I realise that there are problems in rural areas, but we can manage that as well. The school bus system really needs to be revamped and built up. There are so many more children. One can see how the roads are empty in the summer months during the school holidays. This is because we are not all dropping our kids to school. There are solutions to it.

If we build the public transport, it will work. There are examples of that. There was a link put in between Heuston Station and Connolly Station which brought that Newbridge train up into Grand Canal Dock. That track lay idle for years. The track was there and there was connectivity but there were no passenger services on it. They built it. Irish Rail did it in-house and it is now full and being used the whole time. We have all of this rail network system there which is underutilised. In my constituency, in south Greystones, which is also in Deputy Whitmore's constituency, we have a perfectly good rail line but we just do not have trains on it. We have a perfectly good signalling system on it but we do not need it because there are no trains on it. There are only two or three trains a day. This is to be addressed. Electrification can do that. The Minister of State referred to electrification. We can do a hell of a lot more on electrification in the State. Ireland has probably some of the lowest penetration of electric rail services in Europe. It does not all have to be continuous overhead systems. In Germany they use the discontinuous conveyor overhead systems. A train is in contact with the overhead for 60 km where it charges up, and then it can go the next 60 km without being in contact. A line built from Dublin to Cork does not have to be a continuous overhead system. It could be three discontinuous systems. That is the level of thinking we need to be at.

When I heard about battery-powered DART I had my doubts about it and I looked into it, but they work and they will work. We will see them coming into service within the next 18 months to two years, including the Drogheda line. We are hoping to get one also down to Wicklow town. I believe it is possible. The population and the service demand would support such a measure. It is not just about the electrification of the service. It also provides a much better service for people, we can move quicker, there are lighter trains, there is better acceleration, there is better braking, and they are cleaner, quieter, and easier to service. They just make a whole lot of sense.

Rail freight is an area we rarely look at in the State. The western rail corridor is ideal for electrification. The West=On=Track group will be coming into the Oireachtas next week to state its case for the western rail corridor extension, ultimately up to Sligo. Western rail would bring all of the offshore energy in. Given the development and industry out there, it will bring it all the way to Rosslare Port also, which makes perfect sense. It would take the pressure off the east coast. Our national development plan is also looking at this to relieve all of the concentration on the east coast and spread it in the regions. To do that, we need a spine of rail network through it. The track is there. Consider the 1907 map of the railways in Ireland. It was a huge number of railways. I do not believe we would ever need to go back to that level - we have our cars and good roads - but we could do a lot of work in that regard with small amounts of investment. Consider the investment going into Cork now with the Cork rail system. This will transform Cork with electrified rail systems. Limerick is also perfectly designed to have a really good urban electrified system. We cannot call it the DART when it goes to Limerick or Cork. We will have to come up with a different acronym for it.

Electric buses have also been launched, which is another innovation. Many of these things are happening, but it is slow. Investment in transport is expensive but if one invests in a railway, it is investment in a 100-year asset that would never need to be widened. Yes, it would need constant maintenance and bits of upgrades now and again but when more frequency is needed on it, we would just do a signalling upgrade. It is not like a road where one must keep widening it. Then there may be reduced demand and the road is useless for everybody. If there are three lanes on a road, instead of being in traffic in two lanes, one is stuck in the middle lane with a traffic jam on both sides. It does not make sense and I am glad we are getting away from it. Building big wide roads is not progress.

My last point is on SUVs. Deputy O'Rourke referred to the low penetration of electric vehicles, EVs. Why is there such a large uptake of SUVs? Last year 55% of car sales were SUVs. What is it about SUVs? It is the slick marketing and slick advertising that makes people think that they want to go out and drive an SUV. They are just stuck in traffic like everybody else. I have spoken to some people, not judgmentally, about why they bought an SUV. They say they like the seat position in it as they are a little bit higher in it. I ask them if they could not have bought a cushion and saved themselves about €25,000. Anyway, we must look at that. They are getting disproportionately large. There are the crossover models, which I understand are used by families who need that kind of bigger vehicle, but those massive big urban utility vehicles are too wide for parking spaces, are too wide for lanes, are too heavy and visually one cannot see out the front of them. If you are hit by an SUV at 30 km, 40 km, or 60 km, you are dead. That is the end of the story. The bottom line is that we need to cut emissions. Transport is one of those tough ones to crack, but I believe we have the solutions and the will of this Government to do it.

5:25 pm

Photo of Jennifer WhitmoreJennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats)
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I too am a member of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action. I commend Deputy Leddin on his chairing of that committee and I also commend the other members. It is a very active and committed committee.

It has been quite a while since we looked at this report on transport and quite a while since we discussed it. I looked through it last night and remembered all of the discussions we had. It was very inspirational listening to the experts coming in to talk to us about free public transport systems, or about the projects in Germany or in Wales where they have really managed to deal with the issue. We heard of cycling superhighways and green networks, how it could actually work with public transport and our school transport system and concepts such as every village-every hour, which is really the ideal on where we need to get to.

As I read it and remembered the discussion, it seemed further and further away. The reality that many people and communities, particularly rural communities, face when it comes to public transport is a world away from what we have envisaged here. We need the pathway for getting from the current situation to the ideal. I do not believe it is impossible. It is not particularly complex. It will involve political will and a lot of funding and investment but getting the messaging right on public transport will be key. If it is built, people will use it. The messaging around climate change might not necessarily encourage the majority of people to use it but if the messaging was more about the benefits and if it was a reliable, regular and reasonably priced service, people would use it because it would be much easier for them. That is what we need to be working towards.

I will use my county as an example of the current situation because it has a mix of rural and urban areas. However, we are in the commuter belt so there are many rural counties in a much worse situation. To go from Arklow to Greystones, which is the nearest DART station, is a car journey of 35 minutes. There are only two morning services on the train that will get people there in time for work. There are no buses. That is twice in the morning that people can get public transport. Similarly, if someone is going from Wicklow town to Greystones, it is very limited. The bus would take one hour and ten minutes and that would involve two buses and a transfer. It is 24 minutes by car. There is no way we will be able to encourage people to take two buses and travel for an hour and ten minutes if they could just get in their car and drive. That is where we need to be looking. To go from Blessington to Baltinglass, in west Wicklow, is a 24-minute journey by car. There is one bus in the morning at 10.30 a.m., so there is no opportunity to get in for a 9 a.m. start. There is one more bus in the afternoon and two in the evening. Again, there is a very limited service available to people. That is without even looking at the many other towns and villages across the county where there is no or very limited public transport. In Roundwood, Aughrim, Glenealy or Hollywood, it is very limited. Avoca has a train line going through it and a station but that station is closed. That should be a relatively simple upgrade and yet the investment is not being made.

In some areas in the north of the county, such as Bray, there is a better public transport system but there are still issues with how regular it is. Reliability is a major issue for many. I have been dealing with many people over the last few months regarding the 45A and the 185, which are both Go-Ahead services. There are problems with the buses not turning up, being late and not being there at night. If you are trying to get home late at night you need to know that bus is going to bring you home. If people are left in the dark at an empty train station waiting for that bus, that shows it is not safe. We have to acknowledge that safety on public transport is a major disincentive, particularly for women. That is something we need to be looking at. Similarly, the 133 has been causing problems since I was elected. There have been constant issues with that bus service that have never been resolved. I even heard a story about a bus driver who had to ring his wife to get her to come down with cash so he could fill the bus up with diesel while en route. He had to pull in and get diesel, then ring the wife and get her to come down as he had no cash on him, because the bus had not been filled up the night before. These are the kinds of stories we hear. That is the reality for people and what we need to be moving away from.

There is one thing we should do and it should be simple. We need a Local Link that goes around every village in this country and between villages and towns. That would be a game changer. These would be small community buses. There are many private operators keen to get involved. It is a matter of financing it. Those community buses would be lifelines for small rural villages from an economic, social and tourism perspective. There is no downside to it. I am sure everyone has heard of Brittas Bay. I am probably biased but I think it is the most beautiful beach in the country. It is also one of the most popular and most used because it is so close to Dublin. Over the last number of years on fine days, it has become increasingly dangerous to go down there because the traffic is so bad. At one stage last year I was stuck in traffic for 20 minutes and an ambulance trying to get to someone who needed emergency care on the beach could not get through. The traffic is unbelievable, with people parking on both sides of the road. Some remediation measures have been put in place to try to address that, and hopefully this summer will not be as bad, but there is no public transport at all to Brittas Bay or Magheramore. For the past three years, I have been asking the NTA to provide a Local Link seasonal bus service that would go from Greystones through Newcastle, Kilcoole and Wicklow town to Brittas Bay and Arklow. That coastal route could be a huge service in the summer but it would also be a very good service in winter for people going between those towns. Not having a bus connection between those coastal towns is a missed opportunity. I will be raising it again with the NTA this year to see if it can fund that service. There are private operators that would be very keen to get involved in that project if the NTA is not in a position to put a bus on itself.

The work we did on the committee was good in that it paints a picture of what we could have and what we need to have. We need to focus on the here and now and make sure the investment happens. That is primarily a financial investment at this point in time. The Connecting Ireland plan is looking at expanding the Local Link. However, it only got €5 million in this year's budget for the entire country, which is a paltry amount considering the job we expect it to do. When the Minister of State is having those discussions with his Cabinet colleagues around the upcoming budget, I ask that he advocate a strong investment in Local Link. It would make a huge difference. I also ask that the Government invest in the school service. We need a national school scheme, not one that is based on how far away someone is from the school or how many other children are getting it. We need one that all children can access. Not only would that help with traffic and emissions, it would also set a cultural precedent where children would get used to using buses. They will bring that culture into their adulthood and will hopefully remain committed to using public transport into the future.

5:35 pm

Photo of Michael McNamaraMichael McNamara (Clare, Independent)
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I am struck by a number of things about this report. First, let us look around us. This is supposed to be the burning issue of our times and of this Government. I am one of three Opposition Members here, along with the Minister of State from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and Deputies Matthews and Leddin. I have no doubt that a huge amount of work went into preparing this report. I have been on committees over the years. I read through the report, albeit not in as much detail as I would have liked, and it is very clear that a lot of time and work went into it. There was much discussion in the Chamber about battery trains, buses and cars. We should save a thought for the battery chickens working down in the committee rooms, in the darkness with a lack of natural light. The work they do down there should be feeding into what the Dáil does and into policy. I am a little longer in the Dáil than Deputy Leddin but not very long.

I have formed the view that what happens in committees tends to be pretty irrelevant to policy in this State. He will soon get a response to his report, and once he does, he will know it is done and that nobody will ever look at the report again. It will be finished, finito. That is a pity because this report is about a very important issue, namely, the need to reduce emissions, especially in the transport sector.

The premise of the report related to how to reduce emissions by 51% by 2030 but I disagree with that target. Our transport sector has the third or fourth highest emissions per capitain the EU generally. That being the case, it seems we need to reduce our emissions in the transport sector by a lot more than 51%. This has been approached with the premise that we will reduce emissions in every sector by 51%, and I disagree with that because we have to strategise on how to reduce emissions. Every sector is going to have share the burden, with which I have no problem, and reduce emissions a great deal, but there is going to have to be a difference between the sectors because, simply put, that will be required in any budget where we have to trim spending. Sinn Féin is talking about increasing taxation and never talks about trimming spending. It will be in government pretty soon, I think, and it seems the current Government is afraid Sinn Féin will break the country when it gets into power. In fact, it is so afraid that it is going to break the country to prevent Sinn Féin from getting into government in case it breaks the country. In any event, by the time Sinn Féin gets into power, the country will be broke. There will be very little money and it will have to find money in the way the Government I supported had to find money.

The options are pretty horrible, ranging from bad to worse, and it is a little bit like that with reducing emissions. When faced with the options bad and worse, you have to be strategic, protect what you think is most important and trim where you think there are excesses. You cannot just take the same amount from everybody because that is not how it works with taxation. Some people are in a position to pay more than others, and some sectors are in a position to be reduced by more than others. In that regard, some taxation measures were introduced when the country was on its knees in 2011, 2012 and 2013, but corporation tax was not targeted. There was a view, rightly or wrongly, that it was in our strategic interest to maintain corporation tax at a certain level that resulted in inward investment in the country, and we needed to protect that and, most important, the jobs created from that investment. There were also certain taxation measures relating to agriculture because there was a view agriculture was one area that could reinvigorate our economy. Some bad decisions were made by that Government but, in general, the economy recovered.

We need to be strategic in setting our carbon and sectoral targets. We cannot have every Department or every sector take the same amount because that is not strategic. I am not saying we should depart from our overall goals, but we have to be strategic in how we set them. The Dáil has to have a proper debate and vote on this because if this is really the burning issue of our time, there are only five of us Deputies, including the Ceann Comhairle, debating it before we finish for the week. That is simply not reflective of it being the burning issue of our times. Equally, there has to be a proper debate on the sectoral targets as they are set. I am a farmer from an agricultural community and I represent Clare, where agriculture is an important facet of the economy, so perhaps I am biased. Nevertheless, if we stop generating agricultural produce, there will be a degree of displacement and we will import more agricultural produce. I am not saying farmers should not reduce where possible, but we have to keep in sight the possibility Brazil, Argentina and other countries will ramp up production to replace ours. Farmers and agriculture do need to reduce, but not by the same level of transport. Our highest emissions come from our transport sector and there are very high emissions from our agriculture sector too - higher than that in most other EU countries - but most other EU other countries eat food produced in Ireland. Conversely, while we drive cars produced in Germany, the manufacturer of the car is not included in our emissions but rather in Germany's emissions, whereas just the emissions from the driving of it are. We should be more ambitious in our scope in reducing transport emissions.

On the avoid, shift and improve idea, I completely agree but I did not necessarily hear that in Deputy Leddin's contribution. Our approach in Ireland is one of penalising people who drive cars and making it difficult for them without putting an alternative in place. I would love to go to Heuston Station, hop on a train to Ballybrophy and drive not all the way to Clare but only halfway, but the last train to Ballybrophy today has left. I used to get the train from Birdhill. Deputy Leddin will know this line well because it goes through Castleconnell and into Limerick. I would have to get the train at 7 a.m. in Birdhill to get to Dublin for 10 a.m. It used to be 8 a.m. but that was affected by speed limits on the line and so on. There was even a change whereby it was like the Trans-Siberian Railway when they lifted off the thing and changed the gauge. There was something not quite as dramatic as that but not so different in Nenagh to make it even less attractive to get the train in Birdhiill if someone wanted to go on to Dublin. Instead of taking the train in Birdhill, which would involve me driving a car empty apart from me, I had to drive to Ballybrophy, halfway to Dublin. Even at that, the service on that line is wholly inadequate, and it is not just about Birdhill but also about Nenagh, Roscrea and Castleconnell and, ultimately, about having a proper train service.

If we want to shift people from cars into trains and buses, we need to provide the alternative, but we are not doing it. Moreover, we need to subsidise it heavily and perhaps even make it free. I am not the first to suggest that; far from it. My former constituency colleague and current fellow Oireachtas Member, Senator Dooley, also suggested it and it is a very good idea because we need to make it attractive to get people into the idea of public transport, build up the number of people using public transport and then make the case for further investment in public transport. Merely penalising people is not the solution. One contributor to this debate earlier derided people who have made a political career out of roads. The Acting Chairman is indicating with her bell that I am using up more valuable emissions than I had anticipated, so I will conclude presently. People argue to have the road built, get the road built, repair it and whatever: if only as much effort went into getting more buses and trains from those who believe in buses and trains as goes into deriding those arguing for roads.

5:45 pm

Photo of Verona MurphyVerona Murphy (Wexford, Independent)
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They are the worst kinds of emissions.

Photo of Michael McNamaraMichael McNamara (Clare, Independent)
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Are they? I think there are worse but perhaps there are not. That is not for me to judge but rather for the Acting Chairman. I thank her for her time.

Photo of Martin HeydonMartin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael)
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Deputy McNamara proves that with the best of good intentions, it is difficult for us to control our emissions and to keep them in check as much as we would like. I respectfully disagree with his point about the report being finito as soon as it has been compiled. In my opening address, I clearly outlined the progress made since the report's publication and how it is very much a living document. As for his concerns about emissions, our programme for Government clearly refers to the different approaches to different sectors and the different ranges set for different sectors. He mentioned agriculture. There is a lower range, from 22% to 30%, for that sector because the programme for Government intrinsically recognises the societal importance of agriculture to our rural economies in particular and to our overall economy.

We have a shared overall ambition but there are different targets for different areas for very good reasons. Key strategies have been put in place over the last couple of years. We now have a focus on moving to delivery. I talked earlier about bringing people with us. For us to have credibility as a Government, we must also remove anomalies and there are anomalies. Deputy Whitmore touched on some of them.

In my own experience, we have a burning issue in Kildare South in respect of the short-hop zone for rail users. The differentiation between rail users in Sallins and those seven or eight minutes down the track in Newbridge is colossal in terms of the difference in fares and the ability to use the Leap card in a short-hop zone. It is a really significant source of contention and annoyance to south Kildare commuters that there is a €6 difference between Newbridge and Sallins for an adult single ticket for such a small area. A monthly adult ticket costs nearly €90 and a monthly student ticket is €60. We must remove these anomalies. The commuters in Kildare South who commute to Dublin should have fairer fares. It is something my colleagues and I have continuously raised and something on which I will continue to work as a representative for Kildare. This is a burning issue for me.

If we want to bring people with us in terms of this change, we must address these anomalies. We must see a situation where the short-hop zone is extended. People must enjoy the benefits of a more graduated system, whereby the cliff edge between an area that is inside the short-hop zone and an area that is not is addressed. In recent years, the Department of Transport has had to invest significantly in a new car park for Sallins train station because the people of Kildare South are driving to Sallins in Kildare North for cheaper fares, which is understandable when one sees the price difference. This is not about pushing the people of Newbridge, Kildare town, Monasterevin and Portarlington into their cars to drive and move away from public transport. We need to do the opposite. We need to incentivise the use of public transport by having fairer fares for these commuters. They will get back on the train if it is more equitable in terms of the cost incurred by them. That is something on which we will continue to work. The benefit of extending the short-hop zone and use of the Leap card across Kildare South, as well as other areas like counties Meath and Wicklow, is absolutely critical. That sensible approach is what people can see and they will respond positively.

Deputy Whitmore touched on Local Link. As chairman of Fine Gael in the previous Dáil term, I was proud to lead a campaign with my colleagues that sought to extend Local Link services to Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings. I made the proposal to the then Minister, Shane Ross, who responded favourably. At the time, it was derided in the media, which called it the "drink link". There was great merriment at the idea that we were putting on these buses in the evening. It was hugely successful, however. The Local Link companies adopted and embraced it. There were examples in Kildare South, County Kerry and different areas. Local groups like the Irish Countrywomen's Association put on events in the evening because they knew local people would be able to get a Local Link service into the village. The Local Link bus service led to the development and further roll-out of community engagement activity. Whatever people want to do when they get to their destination is their own option, but putting on those transport services and linkages in rural Ireland is absolutely critical. We have people living in dispersed areas all around the country. Everything we do needs to be about balanced regional development. The Acting Chairman knows that all too well in her constituency. We must have these linkages in our rural areas so that when we talk about battery trains and buses and all the rest, people do not just think it is a Dublin-centric or urban-centric approach. This must be for everybody living in this country. We have more people living in rural Ireland now than ever before. They have a good quality of life but we need to make sure transport links fit in with the overall strategy. They are the bits that will bring people with us and make those changes in local areas.

My final point relates to the school transport issue, on which Deputy Whitmore also touched. The change from the nearest school to the second nearest school will address an awful lot of our issues in school transport. The synergies that exist between Local Link, rural transport and our school transport system is an area that has to be extended further.

Returning to the report, I commend Deputy Leddin and his committee on their work. I look forward to seeing its ongoing roll-out as part of Government policy in the years ahead.

5:55 pm

Photo of Brian LeddinBrian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
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I thank the Minister of State for standing in for the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, who was not available, and for giving us a very thorough response to the report. I am really happy to hear that he and his colleagues across Government consider it a living document. I firmly believe that it has to be a living document and that it will become more relevant as we continue to try to overcome this enormous challenge. There were very positive comments around the national investment framework for transport in Ireland sustainability policy, Connecting Ireland and the electric buses that were announced during the week. I am glad to say that the first 20 buses are going to my home city of Limerick and I believe 100 are going to Dublin. Athlone will be ahead of both Limerick and Dublin. It will be the first the town to get the electric buses. The new carriages that are on order are extremely important, particularly with the reduction in public transport fares, which is very positive. We are seeing that this measure is putting pressure on the system. Now that fares are more affordable, more people are using public transport services and trains so we need more of them. We need to invest in that system very significantly.

I will respond to the other speakers, beginning with Deputy McNamara. I was very happy to hear him say that we should go further than 51% in transport if we can. I think we should do so. He is absolutely correct to say we should not treat all sectors equally.

Deputy O'Rourke is the only member of the committee who is with me in the Chamber at present. When we approached this, we did not know what the sectoral emissions targets were going to be. We have a better sense of that since the provisional climate action plan was published in October of last year. The exercise we undertook was to take the 51% and apply it in one particular sector, transport, to begin with. We did not do a numerical analysis. We did a qualitative analysis of what can be done to reduce emissions. It may be the case that we can actually go way beyond 51%.

Deputy McNamara is correct when he says we are a farming nation and a food-producing nation. It is inevitable that agriculture will not have the same target as the other sectors. As the Deputy knows, County Clare will play a huge role in the offshore renewable sector in the coming decades. That will probably do most of the heavy lifting for Ireland.

I am not speaking as Chairman of the committee but certainly as a Limerick Deputy in the context of the Ballybrophy line, about which the Deputy made some very strong comments. There is actual investment happening in that at the moment, which we are very glad to see. The campaign groups have been very vocal about that and they have been pushing us. I think we are going to see that line saved alongside Nenagh, Cloughjordan, Ballybrophy, Castleconnell, Birdhill and Lisnagry. We will probably see a new station at Lisnagry with the development of the Limerick-Shannon metropolitan area transport strategy. This is all very positive.

I will turn to Deputy Whitmore's comments. The Deputy is a very valued member of our committee who works very hard and pushes us, certainly. She outlined a number of deficiencies in the public transport system in County Wicklow. I do not know Wicklow as well as Deputy Whitmore does, of course. I believe the issues they have there are very real.

That brings me to the kernel of my opening remarks, during which I addressed the issue of roads. Whatever about maintaining the roads we have, in this country we have this thing about pushing new road development all the time. If we are doing that, we should consider the capital expenditure involved in keeping that pipeline, which I call the fantasy pipeline as most of these roads will never be built. We are spending hundreds of millions of euros annually on that pipeline. Because we are spending that money, we are not spending it on the services that are required across rural Ireland particularly. Urban Ireland is certainly better served by public transport. I firmly believe we need to be looking at this seriously, as the Welsh did when they said, "No more roads". It did not make sense because they have a road network. The governments of the 2000s invested very heavily in the road network. Maybe there are still some gaps there; that is fair enough. We cannot keep building roads and expect that we will reduce emissions, however, and certainly not by 51% or anything higher than 51% if we continue to build all these new roads. We can do things differently and save a lot of money. We can move from Connecting Ireland.

The Minister of State mentioned Local Link. It really is an excellent service and it can be expanded and rolled out everywhere. It has proven its worth and the doubters have been proved wrong.

However, with Local Link we have to go from a service that provides transport to people who do not have cars to a service that provides transport for people who could afford cars. Unless we get even wealthy people out of cars, we will not hit anything like a 51% cut in emissions. We need to go from a Connecting Ireland type of programme, which is very positive, to every village, every hour. Certainly, if we address that lost expenditure in road building, we can do that and provide a meaningful, attractive and appealing service for people across rural Ireland.

I agree with my colleague on the committee, Deputy O'Rourke, regarding electric vehicles. The grant structure and putting everything in the electric vehicle basket, which was the policy of the previous Government, are a legacy of the thinking that we can tinker around the edges and do little things here and solve the challenges we have. The reality is that we can do a great deal more. We can be a lot more creative about how to solve the transport issue and I certainly agree that how we approach supports for electric vehicles should be examined. We should not be supporting wealthy people to buy electric vehicles when they will buy them anyway. We should not be giving them extensive grants. We should support people who cannot afford electric vehicles and who have no other choice. They are primarily in rural Ireland, where there are no public transport services. Dr. Caulfield appeared before the committee last year and he was particularly clear about this. He outlined the issue of forced car dependency and strongly encouraged us to direct support for electric vehicles towards those people who are in forced car dependency. I agree with him.

Deputy Matthews mentioned SUVs. The way the market has gone is absolutely crazy, with 55% of all new vehicles being SUVs. Many of them are electric SUVs. We have to move away from the big, heavy diesel and petrol guzzling car to the smaller and lighter electric vehicle, primarily, where electric vehicles are required. In the forthcoming budget, I would like to see the Government introduce supports to encourage people towards the smaller and lighter vehicle. As I said earlier, nearly 40% of our transport emissions are caused by car journeys in the zero to 8 km range. Many of those journeys can be done by walking, cycling and certainly with electric bicycles. Many of them can be done by smaller electric vehicles as well. There is no need for a big SUV or Range Rover for these short journeys. Many of the journeys are in urban areas or they begin outside urban areas and end up in the town or city centre.

I am almost out of time so I will make a final comment on rail, which was mentioned by Deputy Matthews. We have an incredible opportunity to turn the tide of investment in rail. The climate and environmental agenda will turn that tide. We can do it for both passengers and freight. In my home city of Limerick there are four under-utilised rail lines. We can link the upgrade and investment in these rail lines with transit oriented development. We can locate hundreds and thousands of new homes, which we desperately need, around new train stations. There is an ambitious plan in Limerick to do that. I believe we must advance that, expedite it and deliver it as quickly as possible.

I will conclude with that. I thank the Members for their contributions.

Question put and agreed to.

Cuireadh an Dáil ar athló ar 6.45 p.m. go dtí 2 p.m., Dé Máirt, an 21 Meitheamh 2022.

The Dáil adjourned at 6.45 p.m. until 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 21 June 2022.