Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)
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As I wrongly assumed I would be finished by 4 p.m., a deputation is waiting to meet me. I hope the Green Paper will address the issues Deputy Stanley raised and I assure him that its recommendations will not be confined to wind. I am not bringing forward the Green Paper because there is confusion about policy. It is being prepared for two reasons. First, the White Paper on energy was published 2007. We do this work every five or six years. Second, the world has changed. When the White Paper was being prepared in 2006, nobody could have forecast what has happened since. For example, nobody forecast what has happened in the United States in terms of hydraulic fracturing. Those are the reasons I am bringing forward the Green Paper, which will subsequently be refined and published as a White Paper for the coming six years. I draw Deputy Stanley's attention to the offshore plan and the fact that we will be publishing a bioenergy proposal in the next few weeks. We have already devised a national renewable energy action plan which deals with many of the issues he raised. Whatever scarcity might exist, it is not a scarcity of policy. The Deputy can be assured that the Green Paper will take a comprehensive view of energy and I hope this committee, as well as my own committee, will have an input into it because there is an obvious interest in dealing with the thorny issue of planning.