Mr. Peter Coyle:

I will leave the storage question to my colleagues, but I would like to respond to the question about education. We are very well placed in the education area. We are producing the skills at the top end.

For example, this year University College Cork has led five universities in Ireland, including Queens University Belfast, in developing and implementing a masters degree in engineering science focused on ocean energy. It is unlikely that any of the graduates from that course this year or for some years to come will necessarily get jobs in ocean energy, but they will get jobs in Scotland, France and other places and they will return here. They are the big investment in the future.

At the lower end of the scale, when talking about fabrication jobs and so forth, we do not have the shipbuilding tradition that Scotland has, so it remains to be seen whether we can generate the skills when they are required, but we are some time away from that. Certainly for the next number of years there will not be any great difficulty in generating the skilled people we require at all levels. It should also be borne in mind that there are very significant research and development facilities here. There are significant facilities in Queens University Belfast and Portaferry. We have the quarter scale wave and tidal energy test device centre in Galway Bay, the Marine Institute facilities, IMERC in Cork and in two weeks the builders arrive to start constructing the new Beaufort laboratory, which is costing €16 million. It will house what I consider to be the most advanced wave and tidal energy test facilities in the world. There are great research and development facilities in place or coming on stream and we have made various provisions for educational skills, so we are fine for the present. However, my colleagues might have something further to say about that or about storage.