Mr. Dara Ó Maoildhia:

Maidin mhaith. Is mise Dara Ó Maoildhia, cathaoirleach Chomharchumann Fuinnimh Oileáin Árann Teoranta, CFOAT. Bunaíodh muid in 2012, thart ar dheich mbliana ó shin, agus táimid ag obair ar son na trí oileáin Árann, Inis Oírr, Inis Meáin, agus Inis Mór. Tá níos mó ná 100 scairshealbhóir againn faoi láthair agus táimid ag méadú gach uile lá. Táimid ag iarraidh go mbeidh gach uile dhuine agus ghnó ar na hoileáin mar scairshealbhóir amach anseo.

Our vision is to convert all three Aran Islands to renewable energy. Ultimately, we want to own and manage our own microgrid. We want 100% conversion and control. We believe that we can convert our island economies from reliance on tourism, which is fickle, as we found out during Covid, to a more solid foundation of the community owning our own renewable energy, which is all around the islands. This will serve to preserve our population, our language and our heritage, all of which is of supreme value, and create quality employment for our young people.

We want the Government to regard our offshore islands as lighthouses for the energy transition. Ireland’s islands are at the forefront and are leading the way. If our islands, especially off the west coast, were designated as the forerunners and pioneers of the energy transition, we may then get more support to achieve this in a speedy manner. The EU has done this with its clean energy for EU islands initiative, where it gives advice and support, including financial support, consultancy and expertise to all the islands throughout Europe. The Government could do the same for our islands and that would help everybody.

We have three legs to our stool or three different areas on which we work. The first is the retrofitting of buildings. In that, we have been quite successful. There are only approximately 500 buildings on the three Aran Islands in total. According to the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, 300 of them have now had some energy-efficiency upgrades. That is a pretty high ratio. That is not just insulation; it is also photovoltaic, PV, panels and heat pumps, of which there are now quite a number on the three islands. However, extra supports are needed to keep this going. I will explain that later.

Our second leg of work is the electrification of transport. At present, we have approximately 20 electric cars, an electric minibus and numerous electric bicycles. We are certainly moving more in that direction. The bigger challenge is to convert the ferry boats and maybe even the fishing boats to renewable energy. We are working on research projects, funded through the EU, to convert the ferries to hydrogen. Some of the local ferry companies are very interested and keen to work with us on that.

The third leg to our stool is the generation of our own renewable energy. We have been working on that for the past ten years and we have just achieved a grid offer for a small turbine on Inis Meáin. That is a real breakthrough. We are also working on a number of offshore projects in tandem with other groups and partners that will produce offshore wind energy off the west coast. We are also involved in European-funded research to do with hydrogen for our ferryboats, in particular.

I would like the committee to understand the challenges we face as island communities because they are very real for us. The first is the extra cost of getting work done on islands. To create a level playing field, we need extra support, not because we are greedy but because we cannot get work such as this done, unless it is more attractive to contractors to come out to work for us.

All the supplies for our islands are delivered to a cargo vessel in Galway. If a member of the committee or anybody else living on the mainland gets a delivery from a supplier, the supplier often does not even charge for the delivery and they get it to the door. Our delivery comes to a cargo boat in Galway and we then have to pay the carriage, including VAT, to get it to our island. Even there, it lands on the pier and we have to pay further costs to get it brought from the pier up to wherever the work is taking place. That is a real extra cost of approximately 10%.

The second is that we have considerable difficulty in getting contractors to do work on islands. Our populations are so small that we do not have contractors living among our community who are SEAI-registered and, therefore, can work on the SEAI grant programme. This means that when we want to get SEAI work done, we have to bring in a contractor from the mainland. However, as the committee well knows, there is more work than contractors out there at present. Contractors can pick and choose the most lucrative and attractive jobs. Unfortunately, jobs on islands are neither lucrative or attractive.

I will give the committee a clear example. The contractor wants to bring his truck out to one of the Aran Islands. He has to deliver the truck to Galway docks. It then might take a day or two to be delivered to the island. Meanwhile, the driver of the truck has to travel another 40 km from Galway to Rossaveal to get the passenger ferry out. He cannot travel with his truck. There is a very high cost to bringing a truck out to the islands on the cargo vessel. When he gets to the island, he has further expense, because he does not have anywhere safe or sheltered to store his materials.

If his workers come out to the island on the morning of their job, they will not start until 11.30 a.m. or 12.00 p.m., because they will have to come in on the morning ferry. If they are leaving again that afternoon, they will have to leave at 4.30 p.m. or, at the latest, 5.00 p.m. They do not do a full day's work. If they stay overnight, they have the cost of overnight accommodation and often, accommodation is not available, because we are such a tourist-attractive place. These are considerable difficulties for contractors. It is why they do not want to come to our islands and why we need extra grant support.

We also have other problems about which I am not sure the committee can do much.

It is therefore very difficult to do any development on the islands. We would like county development plans to designate areas on each of the islands as suitable for renewable energy developments, whether theses be turbines, solar arrays or something else.

We also have a problem with our underwater cable. I believe this will be a problem for every island off the west coast. The cable is not big enough to carry anything worthwhile in terms of exporting energy so, despite our ambitions to generate energy, we have very limited capacity to export it. The cable under the water to the three Aran Islands is a 3 MW cable. The ESB has told us that, if we want to generate our own energy, it will only allow us to export 650 kW, which is only a small fraction of the cable's capacity. Apparently, we need a dedicated cable for export. We are asking the Government to consider laying a 10 MW cable that would be capable of exporting large amounts of electricity generated on the islands. When our exported electricity gets to the mainland, we have to get a grid connection. This depends on the capacity of the local substation. There are also real limitations there.

As the committee will know, the Government has set up a renewable energy support scheme, RESS, which includes a special category for communities. That is great and we are very happy with that but there are some problems with it, partially because it is still in development. We are trying to push ahead on the islands and are being held back by the fact that all of the supports are not in place yet. For example, the ESB has now offered us a grid connection for a wind turbine on Inis Meáin. It has given us two years to get planning permission. Once that is secured, we can go ahead and make the connection. However, getting planning permission within those two years is very challenging for us because we first have to raise the money to pay for the feasibility study required to get the planning permission. We are being held up at the moment because we are trying to raise that money. The application to the LEADER programme will also take a long time. We are quite worried we will not make it within the two years. If we do not, we will lose our offer of a grid connection and go to the back of the queue again. We would like the offer to last three years rather than two. We do not have any influence with the ESB. Perhaps somebody else here does.

We would also like the SEAI to move as quickly as possible in putting supports in place for us. It is talking about giving us soft loans, which would be a great help in getting the feasibility study done. A soft loan means a loan that is paid back if the project goes ahead but that is not paid back if the project collapses, perhaps because of being refused planning permission. We are hoping that will come through quickly but, unfortunately, we need it now.

One of the big opportunities in the future will be offshore wind energy. We are very clear on the islands, as I believe are people on all of the western islands, that we want to be fully involved in the offshore wind projects. We do not just want to have community benefit funds throwing money at us. That is fine but we want a lot more involvement than that. There are great opportunities for all of the western islands in these offshore wind developments. There are opportunities for the development of our harbours, our boating skills, and capacities and employment, and for the whole development of the islands, the western region and the ports associated with our islands. We are most associated with the port at Ros an Mhíl, which definitely needs to be developed as part of all of this. We see very significant opportunities here but we need to be supported in seeking the maximum benefit from these offshore projects for our islands and coastal community.

We would like legislation to be passed that would require developers of offshore projects to engage with the local island and coastal communities to maximise local benefit and which would also require such projects to offer some type of partial ownership to coastal communities and islands, either in the form of shares or contracts allowing us to take on part of the work of looking after the offshore wind project, in other words, that we be given priority.

There is also a real opportunity to develop hydrogen production arising from these offshore wind developments. We are very keen to progress with that. We are involved in a number of European research projects connected with that. We are also involved with some of the other islands around the west coast. We represent the Aran Islands but we are involved with Valentia and Achill in planning a project to produce hydrogen from offshore wind energy. This is another opportunity for the Government to designate supports for islands and coastal communities in the facilitation of hydrogen production from offshore wind energy.

Mar fhocal scoir, tá tús áite ag na hoileáin amach ó chósta thiar na hÉireann san aistriú fuinnimh ní hamháin in Éirinn, ach san Eoraip. Tá ard-duaiseanna SEAI buaite ag Comharchumann Fuinnimh Oileáin Árann Teoranta dhá bhabhta. Bhuaigh ár mic léinn ar Inis Meáin ag BT Young Scientists i mbliana le thogra ar fhuinneamh tonnta agus tá ard-proifíl faighte ag an déagóir Theo Cullen-Mouze ó Chliara mar gníomhaí aeráide. Ba mhaith linn go n-aithneodh an Rialtas ár n-éachtaí agus go dtabharfaí tacaíocht dúinn.