Mr. Liam Curran:

We have been involved in the sector for about four years. We developed this scale offshore network with over 65 companies in it. They have a range of capabilities in the offshore wind industry. A group of the companies involved would be heavily involved in the industry and are currently working in the UK. They would be working in the North Sea, Taiwan, Vietnam, the east coast of the US and so on. We also have a group of companies in there that are involved in the on-shore piece - basically cable landing, substations on shore and grid engineering to bring that power on to the grid. The third group of companies are in the broader marine engineering space and would have capability to move into offshore wind.

We have a growing capability in the sector. Certainly all the companies that we have are tier 2 and that will be the case in the short to medium term. We see significant employment growth in those companies. We also see them buying new vessels for survey work for geotechnical and geophysical applications, for example. We see a number of companies also buying crew transfer vessels, which are effectively the buses of the industry. We see significant interest from overseas tier 1 companies and developers, particularly those in the UK. The developers and tier 1 companies in the UK are the ones that will come to Ireland to develop projects here. Our approach is to get as many of our companies in this cluster as possible into the UK industry with a view to them building their capability in that industry, making connections there, working with these tier 1 companies in the UK and then bringing that capability back home subsequently to maximise the local content in the supply chain for the Irish projects.