Mr. Brendan Tuohy:

I am sure Deputy Cullinane is familiar with the all-Ireland generation capacity statement that is published every year and updated. It provides a ten-year look ahead. This is a really good document and the people who have done it have put a lot of effort into it. They are at the forefront of it.

To go back to the issues Deputy Cullinane raises, at the moment, if one takes the bigger issue of emissions, agriculture is at 33% to 34%, transport is about 22% and electricity is about 20%. We are seeing a move towards heat pumps and the like and there will be a movement towards electric vehicles. The numbers from the Government are factored into the documents, for obvious reasons. That is the way it should be. We will probably move up to 30% at that stage, but 70% of the 30% then will be renewables in terms of overall energy, which would mean we would be up at around 20%. Any way one looks at them, these are really challenging targets. That does not mean we should not have them. I agree that we should have them, but the only way we will deliver on this is that as we move to electrification we must have, first, the infrastructure that I talked about. The second thing is we need to have a public that understands what heat pumps are, what solar photovoltaics, PVs, are, and for that we need a big educational initiative, which the committee recommended. I would not underestimate the importance of that because this is difficult stuff. We are asking people to switch their cars and to put in heat pumps and other such infrastructure. We can provide some grants but this is expensive for families and the just transition issue becomes really important in that regard. What we do not want is that it is an elitist thing that one has solar PV. I will build on the experience I have seen in Dingle. I can see the interest from the local community and among all the different groupings such as schoolchildren and farmers. They all want to change.