Mr. Brendan Tuohy:

I was in Northern Ireland last week and I had a board meeting in Belfast with SONI. A public consultation has concluded. There was one objection and 11 comments and submissions, some from local authorities are very positive. SONI must now decide whether to make a decision on that before 17 January when the broader decision has to be made about the future of the North in the sense of whether the power is taken back or if there is an election. The feeling is that it is going very positively but when one is in a process like that, all one can do is hope for the best and respond to the things that should be done. We are waiting for that to happen. The backstop would be January. The Secretary of State gave the power in order that the officials in the North could make decisions. Previously, there was a planning permission issue and the application was withdrawn simply because of another court case. We are very positive about the impact of the interconnector. It connects the two networks, North and South, so that we would have a seamless North-South interconnector. It is a 400 kV line. It has a power capability of 1,500 MW, which is significant. The benefit of having a single electricity market is the stability I talked about. Everyone does not have to carry extra capacity. We can do that on a national basis. As we discovered, what interconnectors do is allow the electricity to flow depending on the prices, so that one gets reductions in prices. We have seen that and the regulator has seen that.