Mr. Justin Moran:

On the environmental impact, I might first comment briefly on offshore to highlight research we are working on that committee members might be interested in hearing more about, and we might send on some material about this after the meeting. The research, which we are carrying out with Trinity College Dublin and the ESB, is called the Nature+ programme. The idea is to identify ways to develop onshore wind farms in a way that not only minimises the impact on biodiversity but where it can enhance biodiversity in the location where the wind farm is developed. As part of that broad work, we have developed a pollinator plan for onshore wind farms, which we are keen to push forward with our members.

Specifically in regard to offshore, any project looking to develop an offshore wind farm will need to put together an environmental impact assessment report, which will require years of surveys to have been carried out in advance. We often think it would have been great to have been developing offshore wind farms in Ireland in the 2000s or the early 2010s, but one of the advantages of developing them in the 2020s is that we have 20 to 30 years of experience internationally of carrying out environmental surveys and environmental work on offshore wind farms in markets throughout the world, and we can bring that expertise to Ireland. The surveys would include, for example, fish and marine life surveys, marine mammal surveys and years of bird surveys to try to identify the bird movements that will be taking place. The projects will also engage seriously with key stakeholders in that area, including organisations such as the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group, BirdWatch Ireland and the fishing community whose members are out there daily informing themselves about the marine life and taking all that information together in order that, when we get to a point where we can put together a planning application that can be shown to be robust, we will have as much environmental information as possible. We will have identified where there would be an impact, where we can or cannot avoid that and where we will mitigate it, and we will deliver these projects in the most sustainable way possible, conscious of the need to protect our marine biodiversity.