Last week the Minister for Transport Darragh O’Brien unveiled a plan to offer motorists €8,500 if they swap old petrol or diesel cars for new electric ones. While it has been broadly welcomed, it’s only a small piece of a complex jigsaw that will need to be completed if internal combustion engines are to disappear from our roads completely.
Making Ireland’s charging infrastructure fit for purpose is arguably a bigger piece of the puzzle. As things stand, it is woefully inadequate with the 4,000 charging points dotted around the country amounting to less than one third of the EU average.
Meanwhile, the hundreds of thousands of people in homes where off-street charging is not an option are left asking how they are to manage in the new world of cleaner driving.
Patrick O’Neill has been driving an electric vehicle (EV) for four years and lives on a Dublin 7 terrace where home charging is impossible. “That’s definitely made it more challenging,” he says. “Most of the ESB chargers are on streets where you have to pay for parking which adds at least €3 to an hour’s charging. I was clamped once after being unreliably informed that if you were charging your car you didn’t have to pay for parking.”
Even that small incentive is denied to EV motorists like O’Neill.
He has looked into home charging and seen neighbours running cables across footpaths or through windows. “There’s always the fear in the compo culture we live in that someone will trip and you’d be hit with a personal injury claim. Dublin City Council seems to be set against other options and there is no coherent strategy,” he says.
O’Neill travels long distances for work and to visit family and is frequently dismayed by the infrastructure on the motorway network.
“Some petrol stations might have one or two charging points but often they’re broken. The private sector has stepped in and there are fast chargers in Circle Ks or Applegreens but if the Government wants to encourage EV driving, it must be more involved in the infrastructure roll out,” he suggests.
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When announcing the new scrappage scheme, O’Brien admitted as much and said more support was needed with around €45 million to be invested in new charging points this year, leading to a 30 per cent improvement in the EV charging infrastructure.
John O’Keefe is the chief executive of ePower and installs chargers for domestic, business and community use. He says there has been “an awful lot of progress” in the last 12 months.
“Ultra-fast charging gets a lot of attention but we also need to talk about community charging,” he says.
Repurposing street lights to double as charging stations “is a solution for communities without driveways. There are tens of thousands of lamp-posts in Ireland and all of them pretty much could accommodate a slow charge which is all you need if you can leave your car parked there.”
But there’s a stumbling block. Irish lamp-posts are unmetered and as it stands there’s no way to charge users who power their cars.
But installing mini-meters would, O’Keefe says, “be a far more elegant solution than cutting up pavements and putting strips of rubber outside someone’s house” to allow cables run from homes to cars without presenting a trip hazard.
[ Proposed €8,500 EV grants scheme is not policy, it’s a canny PR moveOpens in new window ]
The Department of Transport acknowledges problems with the charging network in its draft EV charging infrastructure strategy for 2026-2028, which completed public consultation last month.
The charging option highlighted in the draft is one that runs cables from homes to on-street parking spaces through narrow channels in footpaths dug, sealed and maintained at the homeowner’s expense.
It references a pilot project under way in Northern Ireland since last October to develop the procedures and protocols for such installations. But many EV owners in the Republic fear this option could become bogged down in protracted procedures and heavy costs.
O’Keefe says he has lobbied for the repurposing of street lights as “a very practical solution” and believes motorists without off-street parking could sign up to community groups to get discounts in their neighbourhood to make it more affordable.
“There is a solution but we just need to get the right people around the table and agree that we could make this happen.”
Chairman of the Irish EV Association Matthew Sealy believes EV owners in Ireland should have a “right to charge” as they do in other EU countries.
Sealy says there needs to be more charging points in sports clubs, shopping centres and cinemas where people are likely to spend a fair bit of time something which “reduces the load fundamentally on the DC (direct current) high power network”.
He says some local authority areas are much more proactive when it comes to the installation of community charging points than others and singles out Dublin, Cork and Limerick for particular praise.
“I was in Belgium last month and was in a hotel that had a shared parking complex with a number of businesses and every single parking space had a charge point. That is where we need to be at.”
