Sir, – Conor Pope’s piece on Ireland’s woeful EV charging infrastructure (How can Ireland solve its dismal electric vehicle charging infrastructure? June 8th) rightly identifies the gap between Government ambition and practical reality. However, the €8,500 scrappage incentive and the debate about lamp-post meters and footpath cables, while not unimportant, risk overlooking precisely where the electricity to power this electric future is coming from.Between the electrification of home heating, the extraordinary and growing demands of data centres – which already consume a disproportionate share of Ireland’s grid capacity – and the proposed mass transition to electric vehicles, one wonders whether shank’s mare might not, in the end, prove the most reliable form of urban transport available to us.The parallel with recycling is instructive. We eventually recognised the real answer to the packaging problem was not to recycle more, but to produce less. Similarly, the honest answer to congested, emissions-heavy roads may not be to electrify every car upon them, but to reduce the number of journeys made in the first place. That means investing seriously in public transport that people actually want to use, and normalising remote working on a larger scale.The right to charge, as the Irish EV Association puts it, is a reasonable demand. The charging point, one might suggest, is the least of our worries. – Yours, etc,BARBARA CLANCY, Allen Park Road, Stillorgan, Co Dublin.