Professor Barry McMullin:

I certainly do not dispute that figure. I have no visibility at all and I am unsure even if the sources of supply of LNG in the UK system are public knowledge. How much of that LNG import into the UK may come from fracked sources is something I have no numbers on.

In principle, it is certainly the case that a proportion of the gas that comes into Ireland from Great Britain has come via LNG routes, and if some of that is coming as fracked gas, then some quantity of it would then be coming into Ireland. I do not have an exact number for the Deputy but it would be small. It would be something of a sledgehammer to crack a nut to deploy domestic LNG to try to mitigate that because we would still be taking in some gas by LNG and would still be bringing gas in over the interconnector. We may not be bringing quite as much via the interconnector but we would still be doing so and we cannot differentiate these sources. We take it from a market supply point at Moffat in Scotland and we cannot say we are taking gas which is coming from the LNG route or from some other route. We are in fact taking whatever gas is available at that hub so we cannot differentiate in that way.

I see the point which the Deputy is making but I am not, shall we say, persuaded that that in itself would provide a very strong argument-----