Mr. Ian Talbot:

The speed at which technology is changing is a reason to get things done quicker. The danger at the moment is that if it takes you three, four or five years to get something ready for delivery, technology will have moved on in the interim. You are then back to saying that this is old technology now and we need to start again. I am tragically old enough that when I started work, I contacted many businesses around the country through the old switchboard in the post office. You had to ring Killorglin 5 and so on. We had not invested in our phone system for 40 years. In the 1980s, we spent a tonne of money on the phone system. We caught up and were then well set when the financial services centre came through, for example. That was at a time when technology was moving in ten- or 20-year gaps. It is now moving in three-, four- or five-year windows, if not quicker. All of those are reasons to get things done now and to get the benefit from them. There is the risk that we keep deferring things and they get worse and worse.

There are many things on the question of wholesale prices versus retail prices. We have made some political decisions about things such as population dispersal, which are causing increased prices. The lack of interconnection is key. There is also the fact that we are a big importer of gas and the electricity pricing mechanism across Europe depends on gas. That is what ultimately sets the price. The sooner we can get more renewables onto the grid, the better placed we are to address these issues.