Professor Michael Morris:

I will make some general points. If we look at the research development ecosystem, we clearly have a lot of failures. The fact that we invest less than 1% of our GNI in third level research is a very significant block to developing some of the solutions we have heard about today. We are an island nation and we are not like most of Europe. We have no history in things like chemical and hydrogen production and the way that system will work in Ireland is probably completely different to the way it would work in Germany. There are real and fundamental research gaps that we will have to tailor to the fact that we are Irish. We cannot rely entirely on Europe funding that research. We have to make the commitment in Ireland about what technologies we can exploit. There are real opportunities. We talked about storage. I mentioned energy shortage. The country is very rich in zeolite deposits from which we can make sodium batteries. It is very rich in zinc for particular employment and local things. Zinc batteries could be used as part of short-term energy storage before we go on to hydrogen and so on. Therefore, there are opportunities. How we allocate research and development tax credits has to be looked at. If you are doing onshore wind, should you really be able to write some of that money off as a research and development tax credit when you are buying it off the shelf and getting someone else to install it? There has to be some consideration that research and development tax credits should be spent within Ireland in doing things further down the pipeline that will address things like the storage of hydrogen. We talk about piping hydrogen; there are not any hydrogen-proof pipes available at the moment. There are real gaps which should be funded and should be part of how we spend and allocate our research and development tax credits.