Mr. Pat Keating:

If you look at where the auctions are and where Ireland is versus other countries, they have much more certainty. Take the ScotWind auction that was held; 17 GW of floating offshore and £750 million raised in just option fees. That provides the ports in Scotland with certainty. We need to be able to determine a run rate or a build-out throughput for our port activity. Option auction fulfils that as well, and so does granting MACs, as we can then see there is a definitive demand for our port infrastructure. Until those elements are in place, it is a bit of a guessing game for the ports. We can push on so far with our planning applications.

However, the time will come when we need to get this infrastructure funded and that certainty needs to be in place, and I keep going back to the MAP Act, that the mechanisms that are prescribed are actually implementable.