Mr. Richard Cronin:

I thank the Deputy. Before I say anything else, the Deputy is right to state that we are an island nation. I am from County Cork. It does not matter where you are from on this island. We are living on an island and we should not forget that. I thank the Deputy for raising that point. The Deputy asked three questions, the first of which was on offshore wind and whether it can, or should, be capped. At the moment, when I speak to the experts in the offshore wind field, what they tell me is that the technology is the key constraint currently to where it can go. There are also issues around the economics of generating the energy. Currently, we have an ambition to install 5 GW of offshore wind by the end of the decade. That will take up a footprint of around 3% of our space. There is further ambition to install 30 GW by mid-century. I do not think that is necessarily six times extrapolation on the 3%, because we can do things like retrofitting the turbines. At the moment, water depth and wave height are two of the key issues. Of course, the further offshore you go with wind energy, the more getting out to it to service the turbines becomes an issue. Looking at the expansion in the southern North Sea in places like Denmark, where the water is quite shallow, offshore islands have been constructed to get access further out. Otherwise, there would be problems. Platforms would have to be built for people to live out there. The technology constraints are the key issue at the moment. That is outside of all other considerations. That is the main cap we have at the moment. It is about getting the technology to catch up. That is for the current offshore renewables that we see, which are either fixed-bottom or floating wind turbines. There are other types as well. There are also environmental constraints, but the interface between the sea floor and wind turbines is well understood. We see it in parts of the North Sea. We understand the impact of turbines when they are anchored and floated. We also understand the interaction with the blades and the interaction they may have with marine animals.

The Deputy asked a question on where we are in comparison with our colleagues in the UK and the UK administrations. If I am honest, I would say that we are around six or seven years behind them. I may have said it in some of the evidence I gave earlier, but we should be able to learn from the progress they made and the processes they had. We should be able to foreshorten that time period and catch up much more quickly. For example, from the establishment of the Scottish act in 2010, we saw the delivery of its MPAs in the middle to the end of the last decade. That is where we are. We are behind and there is no point in hiding from that, but we know where we need to go.

The Deputy's final question was on the issue of west coast versus east coast. There are a few points I wish to make on that. The first, which is pretty obvious to anybody who has travelled, concerns the difference in the environment. One coast is open and facing the Atlantic and the water gets quite deep in a relatively short period of time and drops off into very deep abyssal water. There are also Atlantic Ocean frontal systems that push up against the west coast. The most obvious one of those is the weather for us living on land. That is one of the key issues. The west coast part of Ireland forms corridors for biodiversity, in respect of both the upswelling of nutrients and the movement of stocks, including commercial species and mammals that are sea birds that are using that space because of all the biodiversity there. The east coast, on the other hand, is relatively shallow compared to the west coast. The energy levels from the sea are, in relative terms, much lower. They are still pretty high and there are wave heights of 2 m to 2.5 m. The main difference is in the energy level. There are different biodiversity components on the east cost. Much of that is due to the water depth and the flow of the currents. Many of the oceanographic characteristics are different. However, in general terms, the whole of the Irish marine space fits into an area known as the Celtic Seas, which is part of our waters, France's waters and the UK's waters. It is one ecosystem and we assess it as one ecosystem, but we are aware of, for example, the distribution of where different things live and where different habitats are. We are conscious of that. From a human activity perspective, the difference is in the amount of energy there is out there, and waves and storms.