Mr. Gavin Lawlor:

Can I come in on the district heating piece? I recently worked on a project where we trying to deliver district heating, where the developer of the waste heat, for want of a better description, had surplus heat available. It became a huge challenge to get rid of it, even for somebody who was willing to put in the infrastructure, because the housing developer had to make quite a significant investment in other infrastructure costing over €500,000. The developer decided not to do it, even though there was freely available heat on the doorstep. There are significant challenges to the delivery of district heating. These challenges are not just regulatory in nature and it is not just a case of installing the pipe work and then letting it get built afterwards. There are also cost implications and the fact that we do not have a developed system here. Our construction industry is not familiar with the technologies and the efficiencies therein to be able to deliver it in a meaningful way. Equally, members of the public are not used to it as a concept. It is very difficult to convince people to buy a house that is heated by way of a water pipe that comes from a factory down the road. There are lots of challenges around that and as Ms O'Connor said, we are at the very infancy of active land management and of district heating. That said, we should set strong ambitions and we should really incentivise both.