Noel Dempsey (Meath, Fianna Fail)

We have seen that Ireland has proven in the past to be a very difficult territory in which to prospect successfully. That is because of geology and geography, with less than one in 20 exploratory wells resulting in commercial finds. It must be remembered that these highly expensive wells are only drilled after extensive and expensive geotechnical surveys.

Even if such a State company were to be successful in locating commercially viable wells where so many international companies have been singularly unsuccessful, the company would then have to make massive investments in machinery, equipment, recruitment and training to put itself in a position to exploit this putative resource before any of that resource could be extracted. All that time, our energy dependence on other countries would be growing. The costs of doing this ab initio, particularly in maritime environments as harsh as those found off the Irish coast, would be astronomical. We would end up paying the very firms the framers of this motion resent millions of euro in consultancy fees as the State agency tried to set up and upskill.

If we had such a company, one can imagine the reaction I would get from the very Deputies who tabled this motion if I had to go to the Minister for Finance every year looking for €100 million or €150 million to drill exploration wells off the west coast of lreland, rolling the dice with less than a one in 20 chance of success.

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