Ms Marguerite Sayers:

To address the Senator's questions, I will begin with expenditure. I did, and do, consider €80 million to be a significant amount of expenditure. As will be appreciated, however, within the ESB, as within any company, there is competition for resources. In addition, the ESB is playing a role right across the decarbonisation agenda. That includes e-heat, where we have just started a retrofitting joint venture. More particularly, our networks business connects all the renewable projects in the country that are helping to decarbonise our generation of energy. We are also the owners of generating plants and that area also requires significant investment.

Speaking to profitability, then, typically it would be announced in a good year that the ESB had earned profits somewhere between €400 million and €600 million. Equally, however, much of our annual investment goes on decarbonisation projects. As I have outlined, we are spending €1 billion in that area. Therefore, I think a company spending that amount has a significant level of ambition. We are trying to play our role right across all those emissions areas. That includes 20% in transport, 20% in the electricity generation and 20% in heat. When a company like ours is trying to play a role across all those areas and trying to do all the heavy lifting with the e-car infrastructure as well, as we have been doing for the past decade, that means we have limited resources and we must deploy them in a sensible way.

Turning to the e-cars network, we have been doing that and trying to keep pace with demand. The Senator is not wrong to suggest that up to approximately two years ago we had many faulty chargers. We were not then in a position to be able to replace or fix some of them because several of the original manufacturers had gone out of business and we could not get spare parts. We are pleased now that we have been able to replace all those faulty chargers and increase the level of reliability. Hopefully, that will mean that the Senator will not have the same volume of people coming into his office with complaints in future now that we have 98% reliability. It is, though, something we will continue to monitor and to work on. We are keen to continue to play our role in respect of helping the country to decarbonise in the various ways I mentioned.