Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
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I wish to broach a subject before we finish up. The committee agreed that we would have this session. It is the first of a series of sessions that will lead to the publication of a report. We are very much thinking of the urgency of climate action and the need to create a clean energy system as quickly as possible. That is the focus of this committee. Everybody is very hard-working and diligent in terms of the remit we have. However, events of the last few days at the other side of the Continent have given us another reason to accelerate the ambition we have. I am not necessarily referring to Ireland, but in many countries, energy and defence are very related in terms of policy. We have seen major shifts in defence policy in Europe in the last few days. As Mr. Daly alluded to earlier, Germany made a twin announcement of its ambition to move away from coal and build an LNG infrastructure, which many members of this committee would take serious issue with. However, Germany has its own challenges. I suppose it is not entirely improbable that Europe will decide, at a political level, that it really needs to look to the west for its energy, and to friendly countries, as opposed to less friendly countries, for clean energy. I imagine that in Europe questions are being asked about whether we can do that at scale and more quickly. I am hearing from the witnesses that they are dealing with the system and timeframes that we have. Is there a scenario where we can accelerate this if we change our systems around planning?

Obviously, we need to be very careful that we do that. We also need to recognise the emergency that we have or is it simply not technically realistic to do that?