Professor Stephen Kinsella:

The first is a very simple one-stop regulatory shop that aligns the offshore and onshore planning requirements with the needs of the sector. The second thing I would strongly advise is a review of the intellectual property laws around knowledge transfer. I would connect that to large grants for indigenous companies to set up their own technologies that could actually use these new pathways. I think about it like this. Imagine we struck oil off the coast of Galway. We could one of two things. We could either contract out and effectively rent out the seafloor to a private company, have it extract the oil and then take a percentage of that or we could try to build our own oil rig. If you think about it, it sounds ridiculous. Except, the first oil rig would be crappy, the second one would be better, the third better again and the fourth might be just as good the international ones. That is how every economy has developed over the past 50 years. A book that I cite very often is How Asia Works. It describes how South Korea, Taiwan and other countries realised that they did not want just to be multinational export hubs. They wanted to develop their own industrial capacity. That is why you have South Korean phones with Taiwanese chips in your pocket right now, and not Irish ones.

The third point is to be utterly ruthless with firms subsidised by the State that do not perform well with respect to export. If they are not able to export and compete on the global market, let them die. Do not try to pick winners but certainly call losers. Deputy Durkan mentioned that we do not want the State getting too involved, but we want it to support innovative companies to a greater extent than it currently does.

We have a very large wind resource. It is the second best in the world and can generate 75 GW of power if the forecasts are to be believed. That is incredible and ten times what we think we might use into the future. We will be able to force these companies to give us a bit of their IP. In so doing, we will learn to be much better at this as a country. It sounds fanciful but the history of countries which have developed show us this is the path towards becoming a major industrial power. I do not mean heavy industry; we can be a light industrial power. We lost a huge opportunity last year with the Intel fab around Galway. It would have revolutionised our country. I do not want to see us miss opportunities like that again because we do not have the fundamental principles there. Those are the three things I would do.