Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats)

That is great. I thank the Minister of State.

Next is a small but important thing. As I mentioned at that meeting, when the Marine Institute moved to the west coast, I think it left a gap on the east coast for marine education services. The Marine Institute has excellent outreach programmes with schools but I think it could do a lot more on the east coast. For example, the Bray aquarium is due to reopen in August thanks to Dr. Kevin Flannery and a local businessman. The premise is that it will be an educational facility. It was looking for grants and some State support and help to get it up and running. Unfortunately, there was nothing available. I would love to see more moves towards supporting a facility like that, which could be a core educational facility, even just to get it over the initial step, because I believe there is a gap on the east coast.

We had a meeting this morning with Wind Energy Ireland, MARA and Captain Robert McCabe.

I was quite shocked to learn, although there have been signs for quite some time, that we will have no offshore wind energy produced in Ireland by 2030. We had the Arklow Bank project but it is being decommissioned. The turbines are being taken down at the moment. We did have some wind energy generation off Arklow, and that started 20 years ago. Not only are we not going to have any generation by 2030 but we are also going backwards. I was really shocked to learn that. It is expected that we will have offshore wind energy generation by 2031 or 2032, but, again, it all depends on everything falling into place. I wanted to say that to the Minister of State because I had never thought about it in that way. It is really concerning that we will have no offshore wind energy generation at all by 2030. It obviously potentially could have impacts in the form of fines and the need to purchase emissions credits from the EU, amounting to €26 billion potentially. It will be really important to ensure any challenges or barriers are addressed so we can expedite the delivery of wind energy generation as quickly as possible. We really cannot afford not to meet the target and not to keep the industry going. We cannot let it fail and have all potential investors move elsewhere.