Gareth Scahill (Fine Gael)

I thank the Minister of State very much for the response. A total of 768,000 customers were without electricity in February. We face another winter with the same uncertainty. Probably the only certainty is the chance that we will have power outages.

I could bring anybody in the Chamber to forestry in west Roscommon right now and show them which trees are going to come down and take out which power lines and knock out which group of people in the coming weeks. My constituents and the people of the west deserve to get support on this. They deserve a network that is resilient and our efforts to rectify this problem, which everybody spoke about in February and March but, as of this moment in time, we are still facing another winter with the same problem.

In the last line of the Minister's press statement it states, "The legislation and the regulations it will enable will strike an appropriate balance – between infrastructure resilience, the viability of the forestry sector, environmental impact and control of costs." We are looking for that to happen in a timely manner. We want action now.