Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To answer the question on legislation, we will need regulatory change. We will need legislation in areas like foreshore. There is a need for guidelines and standards. We need to consider whether an omnibus item of legislation will be produced to enshrine all of those or whether they will be developed individually. There are legislative or statutory bottlenecks that are holding sectors back. Foreshore is a clear example of where we need legislation enacted to support an offshore wind sector.

I am open-minded about putting targets into legislation. Doing that will not achieve the targets, policies make that happen, but inserting targets in legislation concentrates the mind. The committee will probably have a view on that. Targets can be good and useful.

The first round of the climate action fund had about 300,000 tonnes on the emissions trading system, ETS, side and about 200,000 tonnes on the non-ETS side. The network of road lighting was on the ETS side. It could be criticised for being very strongly public sector-led, although there were applications coming from the private sector. It probably needs to evolve. We probably need to consider having expressions of interest at an earlier stage and having boot camps, for want of a better word, to help projects come forward to be competitive in the context of what it would do. The headings are probably still relevant but, to get a wider engagement, the State companies or the big companies with the networks, or the local authorities, were in a position to come forward for the first bid. It is important that we got out of the traps and they are really good projects in their own right but we need to broaden it and do more than a simple call for projects for the next round. There needs to be a bit of preliminary support work to get good projects emerging and to get clusters to form to make them happen.