Ms Marie Donnelly:

The Deputy raised a number of points. What are our policy delays? I do not seek to be overly critical of people in Government Departments who are genuinely working hard but there seems to be a challenge with the speed at which policies can be settled, adopted by the Government and made available. That is something that will need to speed up if we are going to meet some of our targets. Some of the policy papers we mentioned have been delayed in their development and in their adoption by the Government.

Some of the policy papers are not technical in nature but political. The renewable spatial policy paper is a political document, not a technical one. It takes political courage to say we have a target of 9 MW for onshore wind and 8 MW of solar. If we are going to deliver that in the country it means that in Donegal you have to do X, in Offaly you have to do Y and in Wexford you have to do Z. Alternatively we could retreat a bit and say that in the northern region we will do X and in the southern region we will do Y. Even to put numbers on that takes political courage. It would require saying that we have national targets and that we have to have them happen on the ground. That is a political decision and it can take a long time to make such decisions. That may well be a reason we have a delay there. I am being blunt about that, but I am in the presence of experts in that respect. Some of it is about the political will to take the tough decisions.

We have been getting messages from Europe, largely as a consequence of the Ukraine war, about the mechanism for overriding national interest. In Spain they use that mechanism to produce new renewable generation capacity within four weeks. In Germany they have removed the option for farmers to make an appeal against planning, on the basis of overriding national interest. It is a brutal mechanism but when you do not have power or energy there are limited choices. I have asked some colleagues to produce a paper on what other countries are doing in that respect and maybe we will look at some of those ideas in Ireland. There are certain infrastructure roll-outs that are necessary in the national interest and it is about the balance of getting that right.

What are the lessons? If I was to take one lesson from what we have been discussing this evening, it is that up until last year nobody took energy seriously. Three years ago, other than in committee meetings, how often did the members think or talk about electricity or energy, or worry about its availability, other than on occasions to say their ESB bill was too high? Most people never did so and they took energy for granted. It was always there, it was going to be available and it was never limited. We had not built energy in as a concern in our industrial or societal development. The importance and role of energy, how necessary it is in our society and how we use it in our society is one of the key lessons. When I was in the Commission dealing with energy efficiency I used to pray for a crisis so that I could talk about energy efficiency and now we have one. It is difficult to deal with it and it is hard to get people to focus on energy unless there is a crisis in it. That is one of the lessons.

For SMEs colocation is an attractive option. It moves their scope 1 and scope 2 emissions to somebody else, which cannot be bad news for the companies. It can be cost-effective and they do not lose access and control. I am not talking about Microsoft and other large companies. I am talking about a moderate-size company that might have a mini data centre in the basement. For them the opportunity is to colocate where somebody else is looking after it. It is still theirs so they do not give anything away. It is their private data centre but it happens to be housed in the colocated centre. They shift their emissions that way and because it is a general location it is more efficient in the energy it uses. I am not sure the awareness of that is high among our SMEs so maybe that is something we could look at communicating more efficiently. It is also a fact that some of these colocation centres cannot operate or get new data centres because they cannot get connections. They are caught by the freeze on connecting data centres. We have to think about what we will do in that context, particularly for those sites that are not in the Dublin region - they may be outside Dublin and close to Limerick, Galway or wherever - where it would be feasible to operate it on a much faster basis. There are real opportunities for our SMEs to be more efficient and carbon-effective in what they can say about their products. There are opportunities there and it would be good to use them.