Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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To be fair, the task force is trying to do that and all of the key Departments are involved. Obviously that is the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, which has responsibility for housing and planning, the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications, which has responsibility for climate and energy, my Department and other Departments in terms of funding and so on.

I hope that we will see in the next couple of months a report by the Shannon Estuary task force, for example. The task force is not only dealing with offshore wind but I suspect that offshore wind will dominate much of its report. That is probably going to involve spending close to half a billion euro of capital investment in Shannon Foynes Port. The task force will look at the potential for wet storage in the estuary, which has depth and space, as well as the capacity to assemble turbines in the existing port facilities. It is hard for people to envisage how big turbines are unless they have seen them. Likewise, there is ambition in Cork to do something similar.