Dr. James Carton:

I thank Deputy Cronin for the question. It is a timely one. Last Friday, we had the first physical meeting in two years in DCU on hydrogen. We invited Mr. Bart Biebuyck, the clean hydrogen partnership programme manager of the EU. We also had Mr. Philip Cheasty from Enterprise Ireland, Ms Sarah Dovern from INTERREG Europe, Ms Siobhan Kelly from the Department of Transport and Mr. Gerry Clabby from the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. All of them did presentations on European funding for hydrogen-specific projects. The opportunity there is to use co-funding between European and Irish development funds to kick off these large-scale deployment projects and move away from the laboratory and even from pilot projects to large-scale deployment projects. Those funds exist. Ireland has been rapped on the knuckles for not applying for these large-scale projects, which we have not done successfully over the last couple of years. We are a laggard with regard to getting large-scale hydrogen funding from Europe.

With regard to academics, jobs and skills, all universities are putting programmes in their departments to upskill employees and to create the future roles we are discussing here today. DCU has created an undergraduate sustainability degree programme. We have also created graduate diplomas and graduate certificates in energy system decarbonisations. All these are oversubscribed and they are only two years in place. We are developing further as we move forward. In this room here, there is a number of projects supported by MaREI and Science Foundation Ireland relating to developing the data. One of the projects, EirWind, was mentioned earlier. H-Wind and HyLIGHT are other ones. These basically aim to produce data that we need to engage with industry and policy-makers, to really just get the numbers to understand what we do if we do A or B or we do A, B and C together at the same time, to develop energy system models and so forth. It is to understand our decarbonisation pathway and, hopefully, feed into Government strategies and then develop roadmaps and plans for industry and investment.

I hope that covers some of the points the Deputy made.