Mr. Pat Keating:

In terms of the blockages, I am not sure if I agree with Mr. McGettigan. A number of policy issues at the moment are preventing developers from even looking at their projects. The Maritime Area Planning Act 2021, which prescribes the future process to engage the plan-led approach, requires designated maritime area plans, DMAPs, for certain areas to be completed and then for Maritime Area Regulatory Authority, MARA, which is the new marine regulatory agency, to issue maritime area consents, MACs, against those DMAPs. The problem is that the DMAPs are not scheduled to be completed until next year at the earliest. Therefore, if you are an offshore developer, you cannot apply for a consent because there is nothing to evaluate the consent against.

In terms of the system that is being prescribed through the Maritime Area Planning Act, we are not hearing there are any issues with that. There is no issue with that architecture. It is the pace of implementing that architecture, in particular for the west coast or for floating offshore, that is the issue.

I suppose we also need to bear in the back of our minds that we are not competing against regions within Ireland. We are competing against France, Spain, Norway and the UK which are all considerably ahead.

As Mr. McGettigan has pointed out, the developer is key here because he will be our customer but we need the port infrastructure in place first. The developer needs to have the DMAPs so that he can apply for a MAC. The MAC needs to be evaluated against the DMAPs to say that it is in the right area. Once a developer has a MAC in his hand, he can then go and do his site survey, project information and all his ecology studies. He has got a piece of paper to justify a spend. Those studies will take roughly 18 months to two years. Then the developer needs to go for planning permission with An Bord Pleanála. At approximately the same time, you will have the offshore renewable electricity support scheme, ORESS, auctions, which is the developer's future revenue stream. If you would like floating offshore and the certainty that is required, none of those processes for floating offshore or for the west coast are in place yet. When we talk about the pace of roll-out or implementation here, that is what is missing.

Given the scale of investment - you are looking at €1.5 billion per gigawatt - the resource is there. There is absolutely no issue. Every commentator agrees we have the best resources in the Atlantic, certainly Europe-wide if not globally. We have a huge resource. We have got the demand, between local demand or Irish demand which will increase to 27 GW, by the way, according to MARA's figures, when we electrify transport, etc., and the European demand of 450 GW as required by 2050 offshore. The resource is there, the demand is there and the implementation piece is in the middle. While we have a prescribed architecture to implement that, the pace and momentum behind the implementation of the various steps and the sequence, not only in the view of Shannon Foynes Port but also from our consultations and discussions with the industry, are out of sync.

Ireland initially nailed its colours to fixed offshore, which is fine, but fixed offshore is a maximum of 5 GW to 7 GW. Floating offshore is 70 GW plus. The scale of the opportunity maybe goes right back to the Government policy on this. All the various different Departments and agencies, to be fair to them, need to be mandated from the top down to start looking at the huge opportunity that is the Atlantic resource and not say that we will do the fixed first. The big international investment is not really interested in Irish fixed because the big opportunity is in the floating offshore at scale. That is where the big investment will happen. Where we sit today, we are looking at least ten years, all going well, from your first floating offshore wind farm.

Time is of the essence because we are competing internationally. The UK's floating auctions are up and running. We are well behind. We are at least four or five years behind. We have the best resource but in terms of risk management and reducing the risk to allow the industry to invest, we are probably not at the races in an international environment where we need to be.