Ms Julie O'Neill:

There are many questions to answer but I will do my best. I thank the Deputy for her points, many of which were very well made. I welcome, in particular, her very positive comments about the staff of the authority. One of my main motivations in putting myself forward for this position was the very high regard in which I hold Dr. Brian Motherway and the team he leads at SEAI. He and his staff are among the most professional bunch of public servants - they are, indeed, servants of the public - I have come across in my career. It is a pleasure to work with them and listen to their views.

The Deputy is right on the energy efficiency measures issue. The authority is doing a lot of very good work in terms of raising awareness, but I agree that much more needs to be done. The Deputy made the point that Ireland is a very small player on the world stage, and there are many larger players who ultimately may have a greater contribution to make on the whole issue of climate change. One could use that as an argument for Ireland being a follower rather than a leader in this area. It would be a case of letting the big boys and girls take the burden of climate change while we continue to do our thing. I do not support that position for a number of reasons. Even leaving aside our binding international obligations and the value of burden sharing in a European and global context, it would be a very foolish and short-sighted approach for Ireland to take. I am not saying that is what the Deputy is suggesting, but it could be read into her wider comments.

Apart from the values we hold as a society, of which sustainability in the economic, social and environmental sense for ourselves and for future generations is an important one, there are real opportunities for Ireland to create jobs and reduce our dependence on dirty and polluting imported fossil fuels. If we allowed ourselves, for argument's sake, to go down the Colm McCarthy route, which is to forget about all this and keep going as we have been going, the problem is that nobody is coming up with a plan B. Everybody is prepared to say what they are against, but it is difficult to get any consistency in terms of their saying what they actually are for. The Deputy is correct that if we start saying, for whatever reason, that we do not like wind, biomass or whatever, then we either reopen the debates about fracking and nuclear or we go back to a situation where we are increasing our dependence on imported fossil fuels.

The Deputy is right, too, about gas generation. Moneypoint and all those issues are not really on my radar and agenda because gas is not a sustainable form of energy. It is for others to make that call. Obviously, gas will be an important part of the mix for the foreseeable future, but we still have the issues of security, supply and everything else.

In regard to the broader issue of community engagement, I would take that at three or four levels. One level is the role of SEAI, and I endorse the point the Deputy made that we have more work to do. We have done quite well in terms of getting messages out, but there may be a lack of awareness about the warmer homes scheme for fuel-poor homes, for instance, despite that information being available on our website and so on. I agree there is more we can do in that regard. It is interesting but not surprising that over the period of the very severe decline in the economy, people's interest, even with grant support available, in investing in insulation for their homes declined because they did not want to spend any of their spare money on anything to do with renovations. They were trying to hold onto whatever small amount of savings they had. It is noteworthy that demand for those schemes is beginning to come back up this year, which is obviously related to the increase in demand for housing and renovations as cash flow begins to improve and the economy picks up. We need to build on that.

I see a very important part of the role of SEAI in setting out its next strategy as relating to its communication function at all types of levels, including encouraging the new generation of young people and working with industry, with clients of our services and with stakeholders in the wider sense. I take the Deputy's point about the hard analysis we can produce that might influence the decisions of local authorities and others. Interestingly, more efficient boilers do help to increase energy efficiency, even if those boilers use gas or oil. Gas is better than oil. Part of the energy efficiency challenge is that even where we continue to rely to the extent we do on fossil fuels, if we can at least reduce the demand for them and use them more efficiently, that in itself will help towards meeting the targets we have to meet.

I distinguish between our role as an authority, which is to produce the hardest possible information about what works and what does not, costs, benefits and all of those issues, and our function in managing community engagement through the planning and other processes. I agree that engagement has not always been done well in the past. It is very much an objective of the White Paper on energy to increase community engagement around energy, and I expect almost every political party will have that as part of their manifestos. Looking at some of the numbers I jotted down, to meet our target for wind, we are looking at 400 to 600 more turbines, which equates to 30 to 40 additional wind farms. One can choose to have larger farms and a smaller number of them, in which case one must think carefully about where to locate them, or a greater number of farms with a smaller number of turbines in each. Microgeneration and the like can make a contribution but one needs to get the sum of the total sufficient to meet the targets.

There is work to be done, too, by the sponsoring companies, not all of which have covered themselves in glory in the past. There is work under way through the planning process concerning the guidelines around this. There is a job to be done by all of us, including SEAI, in terms of getting the information out there about costs and benefits. Another speaker said that many of these projects do not create jobs. In fact, there is potential for wind to contribute 4,400 net jobs between now and 2020, some 2,000 of them in construction, 500 in operations and the remainder in knock-on impacts. We do not always get that message across in a tangible way.