Mr. Shane Conneely:

I am sure Deputy Smith would be surprised to hear that we would not be in complete agreement with her, coming from the business community. Systems need to be changed and we are agreed on this one. One of the problems with the question she asked is that it neglects all the parties that are participants in this. A huge part of the issue in Ireland, in particular, has been the policy, institutional and governance sides. If we blame everything on the market, then we do not pay attention to those other areas where there have been failures. One of the roles of Government is to intrude where there is a market failure. I think we can accept in many areas within the broader environmental and energy space that there are market failures, and I think these are continuing.

At the moment, the North-South interconnector is kind of going but there are huge political issues both north and south of the Border. This is not a market issue. We can see some ideological issues perhaps within the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, CRU, which is limiting the range of action of various players, whether they are semi-State bodies, State bodies or private sector bodies. There are huge issues with the decision by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage to restrict the areas where offshore energy can be built out in phase 2 of our offshore renewable energy schemes. These are critical problems that, in particular, committee members need to fix so that the guys on our side can deliver this stuff.

There is massive appetite and huge opportunity in Ireland for delivering renewable energy. I note the Chair is from Limerick. We have heard Limerick Chamber talk about our offshore potential on the west coast. We have seven times the territory of our country in terms of land at sea. We have a massive resource there. We can play a pivotal role in helping the European bloc to decarbonise. We are not doing it and have not done it largely because of regulatory blocks. We need to look at that and I suggest that is where a large amount of the focus should be. It can be done here and we are asking the committee to do it.