Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)

The international schemes in which we are involved are certified by the agencies through which we will make the purchase. Senator O'Toole's point is well made. It would be a matter of policy, which would be established by the Minister, to do that and the arrangements made already are through the EBDR and through the World Bank. Those are very good schemes.

To illustrate again one of the reasons we need this framework legislation, we got the opportunity just before Christmas to make a bid for €20 million in carbon credits from the World Bank. It was a superb scheme and it was difficult to take that opportunity because of our current inflexibility. I was fortunate to get a period of time in the Dáil where I could get its agreement to purchase the €20 million in credits. We need the arrangements set up in this framework to allow the NTMA, within the public policy parameters which will be determined by the Minister, to purchase carbon credits. Although long, that is the answer to a most interesting question. It is the first time the question had been asked and I thank Senator O'Toole for giving me the opportunity.

I mentioned that the EPA runs the registry here in Ireland where the units are operated on and the NTMA will register the units with the EPA. That is where one will find the registration.

The international transactions are all logged with the UNFCCC. That is why I am so struck by how perverse the debate in Ireland is. The executive secretary of the UNFCCC, Dr. Yvo de Boer, spoke about carbon credit purchases at the recent conference in Paris when the scientific report was published. His contribution was amazing and I wish people from Ireland had paid attention to it. He stated that carbon credit purchasing was a way that developed countries could be ambitious about their targets to remove carbon from the atmosphere in a way which was not inimical or damaging to their industry and which would meet the best of all worlds and be positive from the point of view of the developed world.

The House should remember what I stated in the other House, which sadly was not listened to, that one of the big losers in this entire debate is the developing world. There is a moral imperative on us in the developed world to remember that in Africa, the issue is not concerns about the nature of the generation station but the reality that they have no energy system. There is a real danger that the developed world will decant some of its dirty technology into the developing world at this stage because it will be getting away from the older, dirtier technologies. Instead of tying the developing world to buying second-hand technology which the rest of us have got rid of because it is obsolete, the benefit of the clean development mechanism, CDM, is that it gives the developing world the opportunity to buy into clean technologies without a cost to them. They have spare carbon because they are at a particular point in their development and that allows us to make the necessary transition from high dependence on carbon to a low-carbon economy.

For Senators who have not had the opportunity to read it, I wish to plug the White Paper, Developing a Sustainable Energy Future for Ireland, which outlines hundreds of specific actions. The White Paper has not yet been discussed in the Seanad but a debate on the measures it proposes may be worthwhile. The Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Deputy Noel Dempsey, deserves congratulations for producing the document.

Senator Daly made a valid point in respect of nuclear power. As every Member of this House knows, I have often bored people by saying that nuclear power is the worst way forward. It is madness and will inflict the problems of this generation on the generations to come over the next thousand years. If a nuclear power station was operating in Jerusalem at the time of Christ, we would still be dealing with the dirt it produced. Nuclear power is not a solution. Senator O'Toole touched on the major problem of the vested interests which try to capture the debate, the best example of which is the influence of the nuclear industry on parts of the UK and elsewhere. However, the nuclear lobby is not capturing the debate here.

Senator Daly was correct to point out that the biggest clean energy source in the world is off the west coast of Ireland. The White Paper on sustainable energy makes a significant and courageous commitment to constructing a quarter scale station off the west coast by 2011 and to scale it up to full production by 2015.

I thank Senators, and Senator O'Toole in particular, for their contributions and commend the Bill to the House.