Air Pollution (Amendment) Bill 2025 [Seanad]: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-04-16 ============================================================ Peadar Tóibín (AON), Meath West It is about fuel prices, the M50, traffic congestion and public transport, which are all reasonable and important issues. I am told a freedom of information, FOI, request was submitted to the Department of Transport. This was reported in The Sunday Times this year. The FOI asked whether more public transport capacity would be provided in the Department’s budget this year. That report said that there would be no extra capacity in public transport this year despite the level of funding going into it. A lot of people are travelling from the likes of Meath. Some 60,000 people are forced to use their cars because there is no rail line. It has been promised since 1994. It is going to happen in, maybe, 2036 if no judicial review or anything else happens. These people would give their right arms to be able to get out of the car and sit in a train rather than the four-hour, desperate commute they have. The carrot I mentioned is the provision of public transport, including extra bus capacity as well as train capacity, to get cars off the road in order to clean the air so that people can live healthier and longer lives. That is the frustration that exists among people. Deep retrofitting of homes is still inordinately expensive. It is incredibly expensive for those who live in a semi-detached or detached home, even with the grants provided. It is not available to most income classes at the moment. The provision of solar panels is still incredibly expensive. It costs between €7,000 and €12,000, depending on the level of rooftop solar panels and the type of battery you choose. We have never been as rich but we also have never had as much of a squeezed middle as we do now. Middle income families often fall off a social welfare cliff. They are given no supports. They are too rich for energy social welfare supports but too poor to be able to provide the alternative sources needed to get out of carbon fuels. I will mention something of interest to the Minister. This Government has competing objectives. One of them is the building of extra homes. Highly rated homes are obviously an objective in terms of reducing our energy policy, but they have a negative effect on the supply of homes. It costs an extra 12% to build an A-rated home compared with a normal home. We know there is a viability problem. Every time the price of a home increases, it becomes less viable to build, causing fewer builders to build and a reduction in supply. We know every time the price of a home increases, it also costs more to rent and makes it less accessible to people. While we might achieve the objective of fuel efficiency with A-rated homes, it costs us in the provision of homes on the other side. I still believe that the provision of homes is the most important issue facing the country. The Minister must have seen this report recently that outlined that people who were spending more in A-rating their homes were not necessarily reducing their energy consumption by the same amount. That is a significant problem. If we are spending big chunks of money on the deep retrofitting of homes but it is not leading to the practical, real-world reduction in the consumption of fuels, then that money is going to waste in reality. We are not meeting the objectives and we are paying the money on it. I would like to hear the Minister’s views on how we can square that circle in achieving those objectives. We want to see the reduction of pollution and particulates in the air as well as the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, but we want the Government to realise that there are other objectives that need to be achieved as well. One of the main objectives is fuel and energy affordability and security for families. That has been ignored, which is why we had the big crisis that led to the omnishambles last week on the streets of our country. That is one of the objectives that have been ignored. The other objective that we have to look at is the provision of proper public transport. Hundreds of thousands of people are living in commuter hell at the moment. They undertake two- or three-hour journeys in and out of Dublin on a daily basis just to be able to work. That objective is not being achieved either. --- 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/2026-04-16/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:49+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-04-16