Mr. Pat Keating:

We have been very public with our plans in Foynes. We appointed Bechtel in March or April last year to do an extensive strategic review of our master plan. This included extensive stakeholder consultations, including probably with Wind Energy Ireland. The master plan was published and launched last November by the Minister for Transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan. Our timelines and when we hope to deliver are clear in the master plan. Our timelines dovetail with the phase 1, 2 and 3 enduring regime. Due to re-enabling infrastructure, we need to be there as fast as we can at this stage. We have pencilled in delivery for 2028. That allows for an element of judicial review, by the way.

The skill sets here are wide and diverse. All of the universities in the mid-west region, including the University of Limerick, UL, Technological University of the Shannon, TUS, and the Munster Technological University in Tralee, are looking at this from both a skill set and a research and development point of view. As I keep saying about research and development in this sector, there is a huge role for technology in bringing down costs of production, particularly in the area of floating. Cost of production will be important because this electricity will be competing across Europe. Whether that is drone technology, for example, in terms of operation and maintenance, blade technology and all of these kinds of things, it is very wide. There is huge scope for both research and technology spend and for the skill sets from apprenticeships through to engineers and all of the tertiary sector, including finance and funding.

It is very broad. There are a raft of figures that can be quoted in terms of jobs per gigawatt. The Danes did a study in the summer of 2020 and came up with a number of 14,000 jobs per gigawatt onshore supporting their offshore. They have a very well developed supply chain. The licensing of much of this - and this has been done across Europe - can dictate how much local supply chain content we want in our bidding process. That can be inserted as a key criterion to be looked at, and it is being looked at.