Mr. Michael Manley:

I should acknowledge to Deputy Stanley that after 42 years in the Civil Service, I have become cautious. If I ever appeared to be bold before the Committee of Public Accounts, it was not very nice. Caution does arise over time.

With regard to the Bill, the key message is, as we say at home, is "I am not agin it." The question is how we make all of the elements work within the objective. I am aware it has been suggested that we may be dragged kicking and screaming by the EU into this. That is not actually the case. Ireland was very supportive of the clean energy package. The previous Minister, Deputy Denis Naughten, was very supportive and co-signed letters of ambition in areas such as energy efficiency when some other Ministers were a little more hesitant.

This is not an issue of big versus small. We will need utility scale generation. Hospitals cannot survive on a small collection of generators. They need big, reliable and very secure generation. Equally, we are very much of the view that citizens and communities have different roles, whether generating for personal use with solar panels or whether working with neighbours. The question is how we design the balance on this. We must have the directive on renewable energy sources, RES, transposed by June 2021. We have a huge amount of work to do in consulting people to find out their views.

One of the hallmarks of one of the more recent interventions by the Department - and it has been acknowledged in the contributions on the renewable energy sources or RES directive - has been around asking people what works. In the past two years, behavioural economics students in the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, have been looking at issues such as drivers and motivators, what people listen to and whether a grant is better than a fee payment. This is one of the occasions when I have been more in agreement with all of the contributors around this table than on many previous occasions. We know this dialogue does not end today and will keep running.