Mr. Conall Bolger:

The Deputy is right to highlight the difficulties under TAMS. When it was first announced, great play was made of €10 million funding. As we have seen from a number of parliamentary questions, nothing close to that has been released from the scheme. That reflects a lot of the restrictions that are built in there. The level of take-up has been low because it is difficult to navigate the process, your allocation is not ring fenced from the other elements of your TAMS allowance so if you have undertaken other modernisation measures, you might not have quite the space left to go after the solar side of it and as the Deputy rightly pointed out, there are restrictions on export, which mean that people are essentially not allowed to spill on to the grid. What that means is that they must build a smaller system than would be ideal to meet their needs, which seems contrary to the entire point, which is enabling them to generate their own power, free themselves from the tyranny of the market and protect themselves from the kind of price swings we are seeing.