The annual review of the Climate Change Advisory Council this week warned that Ireland needed to accelerate policy action to have any chance of meeting its climate goals. One of the areas highlighted was transport, where emissions rose 6 per cent last year, bouncing back from a decline during the Covid lockdowns. On current trends, Ireland will fail to meet its goal of a 50 per cent cut in transport emissions by 2030 by a significant amount.
Current policies, the council says, are simply not enough. More needs to be done to get people to shift out of their cars and on to public transport, walking and cycling. Part of this requires accelerating investment in making public transport more accessible – local authorities focusing on park and ride facilities is just one of the recommendations here. But driving also needs to be made more expensive via some mix of congestion charging and higher prices for parking and fuels.
While getting people out of their cars is vital in urban areas, it can often be more difficult in rural Ireland. Improvements in the charging infrastructure and incentives for the uptake of electric vehicles are vital. The council also recommends a recalibration of motor tax, which it says should increase for all but the least polluting vehicles.
The part of this involving stick rather than carrot has obvious political difficulties. The public complains that in many cases public transport options are not attractive. In Dublin investment in bus infrastructure and a proper real-time information system for the public could help here. But at some stage the Government will have to bite the bullet, too, and increase the costs of using the car.
Matt Williams: Take a deep breath and see how Sam Prendergast copes with big Fiji test
New Irish citizens: ‘I hear the racist and xenophobic slurs on the streets. Everything is blamed on immigrants’
Jack Reynor: ‘We were in two minds between eloping or going the whole hog but we got married in Wicklow with about 220 people’
‘I could have gone to California. At this rate, I probably would have raised about half a billion dollars’
There are also wider policy issues. The council calls for this year’s review of the National Planning Framework to increase the target for the proportion of new housing built on brownfield sites near city centres. Combined with good public transport links, this can reduce car use. The alternative is a continuation of urban sprawl and rising emissions. This is a vital part of climate policy, but one on which there has been far too little debate.