I would like the House to look at the citizens information centres and how we might go about ensuring the continuation of these vital service providers. There are a number of these centres around the country offering a diverse range of services to anyone who is in need of them - tax and money services, free legal advice, immigration assistance and Workplace Relations Commission issues. The importance of these centres cannot be overstated yet many fear they are going the same way as the humble post office, with people thinking that if they do not use it, it cannot be that important. In the same way, however, not everyone orders online from Amazon or Etsy, and not everyone has the capability to join a Zoom conference or do DIY research on tax or immigration law. That is why these services exist - to help those people who have no recourse to alternative measures.

It would be appear the Citizens Information Board, the statutory body under the remit of the Department of Social Protection, is implementing a switch, becoming mainly a telephone and website service and failing in the delivery of the traditional face-to-face consultations which have served the people of Ireland very well. The centre in Rathmines was one of the busiest in Dublin, serving Dublin 2, 4 and 6, and anyone could call into it. That centre closed on 22 April and will not be replaced. The paid staff were told of its closure only a week before it closed. Closures also happened recently in Enniscorthy and Wicklow town, and I am told the Crumlin centre is similarly under threat. Buildings used for these centres are seeing their leases run out, with no attempt at renewal and no effort to find alternative premises.

If this trend continues, the service of face-to-face meetings with experienced people in the user's locality will effectively end. This would be especially hard for rural dwellers with limited broadband and limited public transport. I do not need to remind the House there are 500,000 people in this country who can neither read nor write. For that reason, we would do well to invite the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, to the House to see what we can do to ensure future access to the services.

Does Senator Keogan wish to second Senator Boyhan's amendment to the Order of Business?

I second the amendment.

This morning, I met with Liam Grimes and Derek Reilly from Nevo.ie to have a discussion about our electric vehicle industry, the charging network and some of the opportunities and challenges the industry faces over the next couple of years. There are two key points that I thought valuable and we should have a discussion about them at some stage in the future.

One of them was a point I had raised previously, which is that anyone who does not have access to a private driveway cannot avail of an electrical vehicle charging point, so anyone in a terraced house on a street cannot get one. There are a number of ways around this but one of the key ones is to have dedicated charging points on streetscapes where there are 20 to 30 fast chargers operating over 30 minutes. We need to start the process now of local authorities identifying those areas within the urban setting where these fast-charging hubs can go, so people on streets who do not have connections to private driveways can go along, charge the car for 30 minutes, get a full charge and drive away. It is important that, at local authority level, we start to identify those areas now.

There is another issue that many people come across and as we move towards the mass adoption of electric vehicles, this will become more and more common. When people get a charger installed in their home, they then realise that because of the age of their house, rewiring of the house needs to take place to accommodate an electric vehicle charging point, and that rewiring can cost anywhere between €2,000 and €4,000.

We should look at some sort of a subsidy, perhaps within the retrofit programme, specifically for the rewiring of a home in which someone wants to put in an electric charging point for an electric vehicle. It would remove another impediment to electric vehicles and would be very useful. They are two parts of the overall debate about electric vehicles that will be important to facilitate a mass shift from diesel and petrol to electric vehicles. A debate on that at some stage in the future would be very useful.