John McGahon (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I raise the issue of an article that appeared in The Irish Times last week about the proposed increase of vehicle registration tax, VRT, on electric vehicles. My issue around this is twofold. We have ambitious plans about electric vehicles in this country. We want to have 1 million electric vehicles on our roads by 2030. At the same time, there are reports from the Department of Finance that new car prices intend to jump by €1,300 for normal cars and, for electric vehicles, up to €4,100 under budget proposals. That is a result of the Department of Finance's tax strategy group last week, which put forward changes to the VRT system. This will mean the tax rates on regular car emissions would increase by 2% and 5%. The issue is that we want to reach our ambitious long-term climate action targets while at the same time, other arms of Government are coming out with proposals that will hinder and slow this down. Many people in this country want to make the right choices when it comes to climate action and to play a role. Even today, despite there being so many financial incentives and grants towards electric vehicles, they are still out of many people's price range.

When we look to Europe to some of countries that have taken up electric vehicles, Finland stands out as a country where it has increased hugely in the last three years. Finland has swamped the market with financial incentives for electric vehicles. There are so many financial incentives that it would be mad to not drive an electric vehicle in Finland.

In the last day or two, we have had many calls for Members of this House for a debate on transport. That would be timely. I ask that at some stage in the next couple of weeks we have an overall discussion about sustainable travel and transport in general.

If we are trying to reach our climate action goals by 2030 and have 1 million electric vehicles on the road, which is a huge number, we cannot at the same time remove the VRT that would see the price of an electric vehicle increase by about €4,000.We need to make sure that on one side of government, we have the ambitious targets and then on the other side, other arms or channels of government are not introducing things in their Departments that will hinder the work we are trying to achieve in other Departments. I would appreciate a debate on transport in the House at some future stage.