Mr. Dermot Nolan:

We could. We were in front of the Joint Committee on Transport and Communications in November last when we discussed this at some depth. I sent further information and I will send the information to the committee in this regard as well.

In terms of its profitability, the ESB's main activities are fundamentally in electricity generation and networks. It is a segmented company. There is a networks company, there is a generation company and there is a supply business, and it attributes profitability to all three parts.

I am, perhaps, anticipating. The question that came up before Christmas was whether the overall level of ESB profitability was too high. It had reported six-month figures at that point in time of just over €220 million. I will try and say now what I said then. I would say there are three factors.

One, we were genuinely concerned at this level of profitability but we were assured by the ESB in the conversations we had with it - this is reasonably consistent with previous years - that full-year profitability would be nothing like twice that. In particular, it had bought the Northern Ireland Energy Company, NIE, as it is called, and some of their profitability is purely attributable to what is called a financial swap, the details of which entirely escape me. About €70 million of it is entirely attributable to that. Profitability will be much lower in the second half of the year.

Profitability, in general, in the energy sector will, I think, fall somewhat over the next few years for the following reason. Over the past five years, any generator of electricity has essentially had what is called a free carbon allowance. There is a price paid for carbon. Part of the electricity cost that the end consumer pays is the price of carbon. The price - coal is dirty, gas is less dirty - is carbon emissions. There is a set of EU rules that this must be reflected in prices. However, for various reasons which I could not pretend to elucidate, when this was set up they were given five years of free carbon allowance, so although in some sense they had to pay for them, they were given them for free which is a slightly odd situation. As of December last year, that disappeared for all generation companies, not just the ESB - obviously, the ESB controls a significant share of generation in Ireland. The ESB, and other companies, should have somewhat lower profitability as a result because they will be paying for this carbon.