Professor Michael McMahon:

I agree fully with Deputy Canney. In a sense our role here is simply to put some numbers on the table related to some of these costs and these trade-offs. How do we make this transition at the right speed if we have a planning and regulatory system that prevents us from doing changes that we could do quickly, easily or whatever? This is exactly where policy comes in. I fully agree that a number of people choose not to buy an electric car because once or twice a year they drive from Cork to Belfast to see family or something and they are rightly nervous that they might get halfway and cannot find a high-speed charger. Will they need to park up at someone's house or at a pub and leave the car for 12 hours? When I mentioned earlier that policy can help to provide certainty, part of that is by making these investments.

The Deputy mentioned the distinction between transition costs and other costs. I might ask Mr. Carroll to outline some of those again.

We are always very strong on maintenance budgeting. When doing investments, we always need to think about the maintenance side of that. I agree that decisions need to be made, including on this question of what engineers would call robustness of the infrastructure. We might build defences which are perfectly good up to 1 m sea rise, but if it goes to 2 m, they are not so useful. Decisions need to be made and the sooner we start thinking about those decisions, making them and providing some certainty, the better it will be for others. These are Government decisions. These are decisions for the elected Members of the Dáil to ponder. I stress that we do not have much time to ponder them.

I ask Mr. Carroll to speak about the split between the transition compliance and the ongoing costs that we estimate.