Brendan Ryan (Labour)

One could not be against the motion in a deeply felt way because, given the way it normally does business, it is good the Government is doing something. However, one would love to get to the stage of having some sense of the sights being raised to a real vision of the future.

I concede that the target of 30% of electricity generation from renewable sources by 2020 is a serious and demanding target. However, this is only because of the enormous shock of the past six months which caused those in Government to think again about what was obviously going to happen sooner or later — a sudden, perhaps irreversible, rise in the price of oil. It is not that long ago that oil sold on the international market for $15 to $20 a barrel. This was spectacularly cheaper than it was before the first oil crisis in 1973.

It appears that public policy in Ireland was based on the assumption that these conditions would continue and that oil prices were not an issue. I do not know how that policy emerged, because there were significant indicators that this could not be the case. Kyoto alone suggested that our view of energy consumption, based on an eternal supply of cheap oil and gas, was not a viable option. We ignored that. Therefore, because we are late, the 30% target by 2020 is demanding, given the lead time needed to improve technology, plan, raise capital, design and build etc. Despite what has been written about the ESB, there is probably no agency in this country — or perhaps in the world — that can do this job better than it.

According to the National Competitiveness Council's reports, in terms of peer group comparisons the ESB does not do a bad job, one of the reasons being that electricity generation is an enormously capital intensive operation. This means labour costs are significant but not central to it. Therefore, the fact the ESB is more heavily manned than some believe it should be does not have a critical determination. The availability of capital and the capacity to work within budget and deliver within previously estimated capital costs is a characteristic of the ESB which is not shared by public procurement generally. It has long been my view that the ESB should take over project management for the entire public capital programme because it is good at this. We would then see serious value for money.

We are a strange country and the Government is, perhaps, a strange manifestation of this strange country because we develop high-flown hissy fits of environmental sanctimony. We had ourselves convinced for years that we were environmentally unique in Europe — the cleanest, greenest, freshest country. However, it turns out we have significant dirty water. The reason we are not worse is that we were latecomers to industrialisation. Our capacity to manage sewerage alone would disgrace us.

The same is true with regard to energy. We created energy by very dirty processes and let the ESB — which I have said I admire — away with murder in places like Moneypoint for years. Our great good fortune was that the prevailing south-westerly winds blew everything away and we did not have to worry. The resulting pollution did damage in western Europe, but fortunately for us our neighbouring island got all the blame on account of being responsible for 90% of it while we were only responsible for 10%. We were able to continue to talk about our beautiful clean island. However, we were not very clean; we were fortunate through luck and by accident.

Some of our sins and omissions are now coming back to haunt us via the Kyoto Agreement and the need for us to meet some target. What I find hair-raising and what disturbs and distresses me is that we are close to second last in the EU 15 league in terms of supply of energy from renewable sources, with only the British at a lower level. Sweden has an advantage because it has significant hydro resources. In 2004, Denmark was at 15% while Ireland was at approximately 2%. Denmark has no mountains to speak of and therefore does not have great hydro resources but it used the resource it had and is now a world leader in wind energy. Ireland was so busy pretending that the oil would always be there in vast quantities that we took no steps to encourage investment in research in wind energy. Denmark is now making huge sums of money out of the international sales of wind generation equipment. We decided we were far too rich to be concerned about these things and now we are caught.

Some of this information comes from the National Competitiveness Council. Transport is very energy intensive and it consumes as much energy as domestic heating. The proportion of our population which travels by road is very high, as is the proportion of our freight travelling by road which is very high by European standards. The consequence of high intensity road travel and road freight is high volumes of emissions and high volumes of energy use.

I am in complete agreement with Senator Mansergh. The idea that we would have a public policy focused on the reduction in the use of energy, diversification of energy resources and a reduction in the environmental impact of energy transformation while at the same time allowing our national rail services to divest themselves entirely of freight is a contradiction.

I referred this morning to contradictions in public policy, with the idea of An Post deciding that it would ignore toll roads and go around them. I condemn the idea of Iarnród Éireann opting out of the use of renewable energy and of transporting freight because it does not want it while our roads are clogged and overloaded with excessive numbers of trucks.

The Green Paper is welcome but outside the area of energy generation, it is quite limited, almost pathetically so, in the targets and aspirations. This suggests to me that somebody knew something about the ESB and beyond that, they could only think up a few hopeful targets and go on from there. I regard the Fine Gael amendment to the motion as being much more welcome.