Mr. Eoin McGettigan:

I will summarise my statement and be even better. I thank the committee very much for the invite. For those who do not know, the Port of Cork operates the second largest in the State and we operate all six types of port traffic. Our long-term plan is fairly simple. By 2050, we intend to be out of the city centre of Cork and operating in the lower harbour. We also plan to have net-zero emissions by 2050. Those are the two planks of our plan.

Our board approved this plan in March, having had a number of consultation phases over the past three years with stakeholders comprising State agencies, planning officials and the public. This plan will be launched later this month.

There are a number of milestones to this. How does one take a port, which is currently in the city centre and has been there for 200 years, and move it down to the lower harbour?

Step 1 of that was done last year with the opening of a new terminal in Ringaskiddy at a cost of almost €100 million. Step 2 will involve building new facilities in Ringaskiddy where we have planning permission and foreshore licences to build two new berths. Our intention is to use those berths to support the offshore renewable industry in the immediate future and then to repurpose them for container traffic once the offshore renewable industry has built out its needs out at sea.

That is one of the planks of our plan to get out of the city. The other is to build new facilities at Marino Point on the former Irish Fertiliser Industries, IFI, facility but we will need improved road infrastructure to that location to do that. When we leave the city, we will leave behind us two sites, one on the city quays right in the centre of Cork and the other in Tivoli. Both of those are very suitable for compact living and urban regeneration and that is our plan. We have worked with the planning agencies on this and the repurposing of those sites in that way is included in the national development plan, NDP, and the city development plan. We will need to get a market price for those sites when we leave to finance the other work that I have mentioned. In a nutshell, our plan is to leave the city and be relocated in the lower harbour by 2050, and to achieve net-zero emissions in that time scale.