Noel Dempsey (Meath, Fianna Fail)

I have a piece of advice to the Deputies opposite — stay out of the casinos and away from the ponies. I do not think they would make too much money on them.

The private sector is recognised as having the resources, expertise and practical experience essential for such a task. These companies have decades of experience of this type of hazardous and financially risky operation, while this State does not. It is not a difficult choice to make. Some of my Opposition colleagues have a habit of stressing the need for greater self sufficiency and yet, for some strange reason, they think that stopping all prospecting in Irish waters is going to help.

Ireland imports approximately 85% of its gas requirements, which is in stark contrast to the position ten years ago when approximately 95% of our gas requirement came from indigenous supplies through the Kinsale field. We need an indigenous gas supply for the very obvious reason that, in the future, Ireland will be at the very end of a very long supply chain bringing gas from Russia to Europe. As a direct consequence of this, we will be vulnerable. We have witnessed some of the effects of this recently.

Even the EU is becoming increasingly reliant on imported oil and gas, much of which is sourced from geopolitically volatile regions. In addition, increased demand has highlighted deficiencies and bottlenecks in transportation networks, further contributing to price instability. Increasing energy costs are already having an effect on our economy. They are a central factor in driving inflation, which in turn has an adverse effect on our competitiveness and our ability to create jobs.

As Deputy Catherine Murphy noted, we can offset some of the effects of our reliance on imported energy by turning to renewable and sustainable sources. We have doubled our renewable generating capacity over the past two years and now have 846 MW of capacity in renewable energy. In the same vein, I recently announced measures to double the amount of renewable electricity on the grid by 2010 through the renewable energy feed in tariff system, or REFIT, a programme which will cost €119 million over the next 15 years.

New measures to grant aid domestic renewable heating — the greener homes grant programme — have also recently been launched by my Department. Following the 2005 pilot mineral oil tax relief scheme for biofuels, which will see the introduction of 16 million litres of biofuels placed on the market, a further package of €205 million has been agreed for the period until 2010, which will enable us to reach the target of 2% market penetration by biofuels in 2008 — 163 million litres of biofuel.

Despite this, we will be reliant on fossil fuels in several important sectors of our economy for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we must do everything in our power to reduce our dependency on imports of these fossil fuels. In that context, the Corrib project must be seen as strategically important for our long-term security of supply. Existing gas resources, including that of Corrib, are only capable of making a substantial contribution to Ireland's requirements for a number of years. Given current demand, these will quickly decline and must be met from elsewhere. The proposal to freeze future licensing rounds, thus removing the possibility of discovering further resources, is both mad and bad for this country and its people. If, as some Deputies claim, they are interested in making Ireland more self-sufficient, why are they trying to insist that we remain dependent on imported energy and remove the possibility of discovering our own supplies of oil and gas? Future licensing is an imperative if Ireland is to deal with security of supply, an issue that is becoming more acute by the month.

There has been much uninformed comment and insinuation about the fiscal terms under which exploration companies operate in this country, much of which is patent nonsense which fails to recognise any of the realities we have discussed today. I politely ask the Opposition at least to carry out some research in this area. The current licensing terms are merely a reflection of the relative difficulties experienced by those prospecting for hydrocarbons in Irish waters in the past. In other words, they are set to attract the only companies in the world capable of finding and drilling our natural resources and thus benefiting the Irish consumer.

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