Mr. Peter Coyle:

Far be it from me to criticise the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, as I effectively worked for it for 35 years, but I will take the last issue first. To some extent, we are a victim of the siloed aspect of Irish government, in that Departments are tribes in their own right. To put it crudely, they are interested in their own territories and are not very interested in other people's territories. This reflects the fact, which is an issue for another day, that there has been no fundamental examination of the public service since 1969 with the Devlin report. It must be the only institution in the world that has not been examined in more than 50 years.

Some of the mechanisms that are being put in place behind the scenes, which to non-bureaucrats appear to be unwieldy and bureaucratic, are designed to get over that silo effect and improve communications. There is no ill will between these people. It is just that this matter does not feature as much on that Department's radar as it does on that of the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. I do not mean this to appear critical, but the latter has sucked in a great deal of the talent in the public service in recent times because of this very important issue, which is extraordinarily complex to address.

We have the two most renowned agencies in the development agency world in the IDA and Enterprise Ireland. I have worked for both of them, so I am biased, but they are world renowned and the best in the business. If they are given a political direction and a Civil Service direction to go big and have ambitions in this area, they can achieve great things. They will not be able to do anything in the short term about bottom-fixed offshore wind energy, though, because it is an established industry. It did not exist 22 years ago. The first offshore wind farm was built in Denmark in 2000. The second in the world was Arklow with its little 25 MW, which opened in 2004. We did not take up that opportunity, though. I am one of those who was responsible for not taking it up because, unusually and uncharacteristically, we in the IDA scoffed at offshore wind energy in the 1980s and, in particular, 1990s.

There are some excellent pioneers in the IDA and Enterprise Ireland working on this area, but I do not believe that the organisations have been given a vision or a demanding goal of making Ireland a global player in the provision of parts, services and so forth – it does not have to be full-scale rigs – in floating wind energy and wave energy going forward.

I will speak to a point that the Chairman did not mention, although he used the word in a different context, that being, security. As an industry, we made strong representations to the Commission on the Defence Forces. They are published on our website as well as the commission's. Our offshore world has changed and we are going to become dependent on it for our domestic security and exports. We need proper security provision. The commission recommended the drawing up of a maritime security plan. We back that and want to be involved in it. There is ample scope for bad actors, not so much to damage particular turbines, given that we can remove and replace them, but to damage the big wire that goes ashore and the substation that pulls all of the wires together and steps up or steps down – I can never remember which it is – the voltage. A substation is as complex as an oil rig. It takes years to build and is not bought out of a box. In many instances, a substation costs hundreds of millions of euro. The cable that runs from the substation to the shore is extraordinarily expensive. There are back orders of approximately two years, it is complex to lay, etc. The Naval Service would not necessarily need to be significantly involved, but it needs to be given a clear mandate to make it responsible for pulling together the maritime security plan whenever that is drawn up, which I hope it will be urgently, and dealing with any contingency that might arise as regards the substations and the cables going ashore. This needs to be done urgently because we will have 5 GW in the sea in eight years' time.