The Green Party has called for the Government to mandate all filing stations to install electric charging points, in a bid encourage the take-up of low emission vehicles.
The party also called for the Government to examine the ending of current subsidies on diesel - a move which would add about 10 cent per litre to the price of fuel for owners of diesel cars.
However, the party stopped short of advocating that electric vehicles be allowed to use the bus lanes, or park for free within the city.
Speaking in Dublin at the launch of the new filling stations policy, party leader Eamon Ryan said a survey carried out in association with the Irish Electric Vehicle Owners’Association identified the lower costs of electric power to be the main attraction for purchasers, while the lack of public charging stations was the biggest difficulty.
The ESB’s network of 1,200 chargers - 300 of which are in Northern Ireland - was also criticised by the party for “falling behind”. Mr Ryan said a practical move would be to put a charging point in every filling station. “The UK are going to do it we want to do the same”, he said.
Mr Cuffe said he was on the board of the East Link bridge and he and fellow board members were “looking at trying to have a reduced toll for electric vehicles. Little things like this can help nudge behaviour and move it towards electric cars”, he said.
But he said he “would be cautious about allowing EVs into bus lanes. Buses have 50 to 60 people, EVs probably have the same amount of people as other cars”.
“Lets look at our car parking regime. If we can it would be nice to provide encouragement if we could provide lower parking charges. But really what we want to do is to encourage people to use public transport, walk and cycle so I would be cautious about over incentivising people to drive into town.”
Referring to potential restrictions on diesel cars in the future Mr Ryan said he the Government should look at the subsidy it provided for diesel which results in diesel being cheaper than petrol.
Mr Ryan said the current differential in price between petrol and diesel was about 10c and he said the Government should consider removing that subsidy in the upcoming budget.
Asked if he wanted the money saved by the exchequer to be ring fenced for investment in electric vehicle incentives Mr Ryan said it would be needed by the exchequer to help fill the gap in tax revenue, caused by people buying electric cars which were cheaper to run “and even cheaper to maintain”.
