Dan Boyle (Green Party)

The Government has already put in place new building standards for houses, increased support for research and development into wave energy, increased the tariffs for wind energy and brought about ideas on micro-management. To claim nothing is happening is politically false. Fine Gael is trying to attach itself to a zeitgeist that exists despite it. Fine Gael wants to be part of it because the political reality is that the future is in these ideas and being in Government delivering these ideas is the challenge for anybody interested in political office. I welcome that aspect of what Fine Gael is saying today. Although the ideas it articulated are not its ideas or new ideas, we need to pursue them. On that ground there is much to welcome in the motion.

Given the economic situation and the need for public sector reform, I am intrigued by the idea that we need a new agency. The idea of public service reform is that we examine our existing network of agencies, many of which are not performing as they should, and ask how can they be rationalised and reorganised. The last thing we need is a new body to implement measures that are part of a policy agenda this Government is implementing. If there is a valid political criticism, Fine Gael could say things may not be done as quickly or as competently as they could or they may not be articulated or formulated as well as they could, but those are not the arguments being made this evening.

We are hearing that a vacuum exists and that as the main Opposition party Fine Gael alone can fill it. I cannot accept that, particularly in a political context where we need to address these issues collectively. I hope that as reality dawns on all of us in political life about the need to develop a new economy, these ideas will become common currency among us all.

I can articulate in two companies the type of support I already see bearing fruit in terms of our future economy. OceanEnergy is a Cork-based company doing testing for wave energy off the coast of Galway. It is already on to a three quarter-size model of a turbine which will turn into a full-size model, which will turn into a nest of turbines, which will generate alone half of what we hope to produce in renewable wave energy. We have set a very ambitious target that 40% of our electricity will be generated by renewable energy by 2020.

The other company worth talking about is OpenHydro, a group operating from Cooley in Dundalk that specialises in tidal power. It is producing a turbine that attaches itself to the sea bed and is testing it off the coast of Scotland, but it is being produced in Ireland. The beauty of such developments in formulating a new economy is that the investment is going in producing jobs in research and development and opportunities in technology that can be sold elsewhere, not only producing energy here, and that is the experience of OpenHydro. The ultimate advantage of these technologies is that they require heavy engineering solutions. The production of turbines for wave and tidal energy give an alternative use to old ship yards and dry docks and could employ hundreds of people working with heavy engineering to produce the new hardware of the future.

This is where Fine Gael's ideas as it articulates them need to be fleshed out. We are in an era where we exist with our economic situation and have to deal with our environmental reality that has a global impact, but we also have to flesh out ideas. We are beyond the time in the global economy and the world environment when we can talk about mere aspirations. This is about putting one's money where one's mouth is and pledging oneself to long-term goals. If that is where Fine Gael is coming from it will have my support in helping it flesh out that activity, however it cannot claim to do so in the vacuum in which it operates. These are not new ideas. They require new thinking.