Caít Keane (Fine Gael)

What I have to say will not be as heart-rending as what Senator O'Brien had to say just now. I support Senator Ivana Bacik's comments on the Euroscience Open Forum. Ireland secured the hosting of the forum from stiff opposition from other European countries. I understand the final choice was between Vienna and Dublin and that Dublin won out. This is a major achievement for Ireland.

There was a new announcement today of 50 extra jobs from ancestry.com. One reason the company gave for choosing Ireland - it is here already - was the great array of talented people. We must have debates on where we are falling down in mathematics and science but we should not talk ourselves down too much because we have an array of talented people in Ireland and this is recognised. We must ensure we keep this going and have a debate that will support it. Moreover, Ireland is to become the first international research partner of NASA. The country was not chosen by chance. It was chosen because of the people who are here and those who were here.

I want to ask today what we are going to do about electric cars. The technology is ongoing but we have only developed a small percentage of it. This week Dublin was shown to be in the top ten most congested cities in Europe. That is a statistic at which we all should look to see what we can do to ensure we speed up the introduction of electric cars. Today the Dublin Airport Authority announced five new charging points at Dublin Airport, which is a great advancement. There are 340 such points nationwide in Ireland. I want to see whether we can produce a leaflet and whether we could encourage the Minister to come to the House in order that we could ask him whether we could introduce incentives to get rid of our anxiety about the journey range of electric cars and other incentives such as free parking spaces for them. There is a need for innovative incentives such as exist in other countries where some shopping centres have free charging points for electric cars. One could not have such incentives forever but if we could have a debate on it, we could see how we can speed up the introduction of such cars. There are eight different electric cars on show today at the science forum. We should go down and have a look at them.