Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Maybe even a year ago. If one looks at even agricultural practices now in terms of how family farms are run, how grassland is managed and how slurry is injected into the soil, there is extraordinary change happening. I am only using agriculture as an example, but it is across lots of other sectors too. We should recognise that because some of this change is not easy.

On the offshore wind side, I am a big proponent of this. Something I did not mention earlier, which I assume this committee will be interested in, is that by the end of the first quarter of next year we will be publishing a new industrial strategy for offshore wind. Of course, that is about recognising the importance of offshore wind from a climate and decarbonisation perspective, but it has a huge benefit as well in terms of new clean industrial development for Ireland creating new clusters of development opportunity in places such as the Shannon Estuary, in and around Cork Harbour, probably in and around Rosslare Harbour and, potentially, places such as Killybegs, where we will see whole industries being built up around servicing, assembly, landing of cables onshore and strengthening of grid infrastructure from some huge infrastructure projects that are likely to be built over the next 25 years offshore. To give the committee a sense of that, it costs €3 billion to build 1 GW of capacity of wind generation offshore. We are talking about building 37 GW of it. Over the next 25 years, only in terms of the build cost of this infrastructure, we are talking about well over €100 billion, entirely funded by the private sector. That is the scale of what we are talking about. This can lead to an extraordinary generation of economic activity in the west coast and the south coast and can be a rebalancer, if you like, of the dominance of Dublin and the east coast from a wealth generation perspective. We are quite excited about that. We are working with the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, obviously, because we are on multiple task forces with his Department team in terms of trying to make that happen because building this scale of infrastructure offshore, as we have heard from Deputy Whitmore, will be challenged, and there will be a whole load of barriers in the way that we have to get past to get to where we need to be.

The other point I would make is that there is a new approach towards rail freight, trying to link Shannon Foynes to Limerick, linking Rosslare to Waterford and Galway to Claremorris, which is more of a commuter link in some ways but also some freight potentially. We are trying to build-in viability to get bulk freight, in particular, off the road and onto rail where we can and then, of course, to electrify the rail system over time to help to decarbonise it. There is a lot of good stuff happening there.

Obviously, the job of this committee is to focus on what is not happening yet and to keep me under pressure to make sure that it happens but, when one looks at the lifetime of this Government over the past number of years in the context of climate and environment, it will be an extraordinary record when one looks back in 20 years' and 30 years' time as to what began during that period. I am obviously a little bit partisan politically on that. We will be judged by the experts but there is a lot of good stuff under way. Meeting targets though, particularly the 2025 targets, will be really difficult. That needs to drive a lot of change and acceleration next year.