Electric Vehicles Dail Éireann — 2026-03-26 ============================================================ Brian Stanley (IND), Laois I raise the issue of charging points in Laois - or the absence of the charging points in most of the county. We have a situation where there are 21 publicly available charging points in the county. That is the latest information I can get. I have a map of Laois which shows the charging points run down the centre of the county. That is fine because there is the N7 and N8 but there is the N80, the R44 and many other roads. The whole east and west of the county have been left out of it. The biggest barrier to getting people to move to electric cars is range anxiety and access to charging points. If drivers have to travel to charge or they have to queue, that deters them. Laois has them in the middle of the county. It is a county with a population of almost 100,000. There are none in the east of the county. There is nothing the whole way from Portlaoise to Carlow town. There is nothing in Stradbally, Ballylynan, The Swan, Newtown or Graiguecullen. In the south and west of the county, Durrow has none along with Borris-in-Ossory, Castletown, Camross, Errill and Clonaslee. In Rosenallis, there are none. Mountmellick has a population in the region of 5,000 and has just one charging point. While 75% to 80% of charging will be done at home, I think the Minister of State will agree that we need public charging points. I welcome the chargers that have been put down through the middle of the county and there is a need for more. However, the east and west of the county is completely blank, according to the map and the documents I have. As the Minister of State and I know, people in rural areas are car-dependent. There are a few Local Links but for work and at other times, people need to use a car. This week has shown that we need to try to move away from fossil fuels. They will become more expensive so people will go electric. We have to make it easier for people to get children to school and to get work, get to hospital appointments and do their business in local towns and villages. There is not a bus going up every road, even though rural transport has improved. You cannot have one on every boreen and I think we accept that. As I understand it, the number in the State is in the region of 2,500 but we have only 21 public charging points in Laois. According to information given in answer to previous parliamentary questions, I see the aim is for between 3,200 and 6,210 public chargers. That is a huge variation and the Minister of State might just address that. Is there a target and timeframe for that? They need to be better distributed. We cannot have a situation where the price of petrol and diesel will go up and up in the coming years. We know that with Donald Trump and Israel's crazy war in the Gulf fuel prices will not go back down to what they were at before that. We know that. It was the same in Covid. Prices went up but they never went back to pre-Covid levels. It will be the same with this. We need to provide the option and make it easier for people to move to electric vehicles, including people in rural areas. The Minister of State is from a rural constituency and so am I. He understands what I am saying to him. If people in the far corners of the county have to travel to work or beyond that, we need to ensure there are those charging points. What is the plan to increase the number in the State? What is the plan to increase the number in County Laois? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-03-26/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:47+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-03-26