Eamon O'Reilly

Government has decided that it itself is going to, through GNI, build an LNG plant just down the shore from Moneypoint, in fact, not too far from it, which is far too small for the country's needs.

So the next report that the Academy will be putting out is one which is going to look at LNG and the actual needs that the country has.

They are far greater than what government is currently proposing.

They're more akin to what was proposed.

Who's advising the government then?

I think what's happening, what's happened in the past was the politicians are telling civil servants what they do want to see happen.

The civil servants are employing foreign consultants and giving them terms of reference which are carefully prescribed to them to give the politicians what they want.

Our energy policy in this development has been a real mess.

So the reports we're putting out are not intended to be critical of any of the state companies.

The state companies are, they actually have a dead hand on them.

The dead hand of awful energy policy.

And that's what needs to change, Pat.

Well, by the time they might get to that, there will be an awful lot of more offshore wind built, fixed bottom offshore wind, not floating.

So at the moment, there's about 3,500 megawatts which have state contracts in place.

So Codling, for example, ESB have 900 megawatts off the southwest coast.

And there's possibly up to 20,000 more coming after that.

By the time you've built all of this fixed bottom offshore wind, I doubt if Ireland can ever need much more than that.

We're supposed to have 5,000 megawatts by 2030.

We clearly won't.

We might have it by 2035.