Mr. John Finnegan:

The RESS is an extremely important programme. It is central to meeting our renewable targets and hence our carbon targets. Everyone shares the concern that has been mentioned already about the survey earlier in the week where 98% of the stakeholders expressed exasperation or a concern that we were not going to meet those targets. As the Department stated at the time, we understand their concerns. We work very closely all of the people involved in that survey. We are working very hard to address those concerns and we have been very successful so far with RESS and its predecessors. The core issues that delay all of this are planning and grid connections. There are two aspects to reducing the planning times and they are both well under way. When the new planning legislation comes into force, it will put statutory deadlines in place for all stages of the process for the first time. For the first time, those also will be extended to An Bord Pleanála. Equally importantly, we can send on the figures for this if the committee wishes, there has been a huge increase in manpower resources available to local authorities, the National Parks and Wildlife Service and An Bord Pleanála to process the applications. In fairness to the authorities, the applications are very complex. They have a very heavy burden in assessing the environmental and other impacts of these projects. There is no point in setting the deadlines unless they are also provided with the resources to process the applications appropriately. We have updated figures on that which I will provide to the committee afterwards. To summarise, the statutory changes will impose statutory deadlines and there has been a large investment in resources, in terms of people to process these things.

The issue of the grid is always a concern-----