Francis Noel Duffy (Dublin South West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I rarely speak for this long. I have another question that is combined with the last one. It is on a similar point. I taught in a school of architecture. I talked about energy and the fact that we were importing €6 billion worth of energy when we have the capacity to export it. It is phenomenal that in a generation or two, we could be doing very well as a country by exporting energy. As a State, our budget is about €90 billion and a lot of that goes on wages. It also goes to education, health and all the rest of it. We do not have an enormous surplus to assist in investing in ourselves. That is sad, in a way. We will have to depend, I assume, on a considerable amount of money coming from outside. It is not a cheap industry. We will be prospecting. Perhaps that is more of a statement. Perhaps there is funding. Perhaps there is EU funding or world funding to assist us to push forward quicker, at least with regard to the infrastructure.

It is good that Dr. Mellett is here. Are we going to need a serious naval force, going forward, to protect our asset? The fishermen have been chasing off the Russians. Do we have to begin to think about that? If we have a lot of hardware floating around on the sea, will we need to protect it?