Mr. Gavin Lawlor:

I will take the renewables piece first and I will ask my colleague to deal with the other question. Renewables are something I am quite passionate about and understand very well. We do not have a national implementation strategy for renewables and we have not properly designated in an objective way where certain renewables should go in the country. We are still struggling with the concept of biogas or anaerobic digestion and it is still not properly understood by certain local authorities, which are still preparing policies on it. We only produce about 2 MW of energy from biogas currently. It is a huge resource that we could tap into. The committee heard that we need 12 GW of renewable energy, which is a monstrous amount. On the flipside of that, it would appear that we do not have the physical infrastructure to properly move that energy around the wirescape, so to speak. If we think about the difficulty and the challenges for EirGrid in just trying to achieve the North-South interconnector - I will not talk about the good or bad of that but just the challenges in trying to achieve it - they are very significant.

While I am not advocating for strategic developments, we believe something like that, where there is a fast-track process for renewable energy and energy infrastructure, is needed to try to deliver upon the ambitions. If we do not do that, the current planning system will not allow us to achieve any of our ambitions in terms of renewables. To be blunt about it, we cannot even write a policy document and it takes us well over ten years to get to that point.