Ms Marie Donnelly:

On the price of electricity, people feel that perhaps we have not been honest with them. The reality is the price of electricity, as indeed the price of oil and other things, went up because of the Ukrainian war and because there was a supply shortage. We all know that when there is supply shortage, the price goes up. Because the price of gas went up almost 400 fold - an unimaginable amount - it became the determiner of the price of electricity. What can Ireland do about it? We can stop using fossil fuel in our electricity system and then our electricity prices will be decided by our own natural resources. We can decide if we want high or low prices. They are our resources and we will decide. That is why we need the wind turbines.

It is important the conversation is undertaken, that there is full communication and consultation, and that communities are involved in the discussion. The rationale and the reason we need the wind turbines should be discussed and made transparently clear to people, and we must ensure people who are physically proximate to wind farms, in particular, are benefiting from the community support mechanism. On average, that support mechanism is approximately €2.5 million over a 15-year period. That is not a bad amount of money going into a community to do things the community wants for itself. It is a hands-off amount of money, it is their money and they can decide what to do with it. We have to be able to join the dots to make sense to people about why it is we need to get off imported fossil fuels and use our own natural resources.

On batteries for cars, it is not batteries for cars. We will be using batteries in the electricity system and batteries in balancing the grid. We will be recycling the batteries. We will be taking the lithium and the cobalt and recycling them, and that will be the norm. That will be the way we will do it and that will be our practice. Of course, over time it is very probable that battery technology will also advance. We do not know yet what is coming down the track. There could be other mechanisms of battery energy storage becoming available to us.

My final comment is on social housing. The council has repeatedly called for a policy to be published by the Government on the roll-out of district heating. Last year, the SEAI completed a study and it found we could get 50% of our heat through district heating facilities, which do not actually require the retrofit but can still heat the house enough to keep people warm and can be decarbonised. We urgently need this policy and, ultimately, the support to roll it out. It happens in other parts of Europe and it is very successful. There are very good examples of that in Tallaght and in Tralee. There are a few cases of it being used, but we really need to be able to roll that out so that everybody can benefit from it and not just those who can afford either the time, effort or cost of the retrofit, which involves a lot of effort from people who undertake it.