Roderick O'Gorman

Thanks, Clare.

And morning, Michael.

Look, our whole goal as a country should be to obtain energy independence that will deliver cheaper bills for households across Ireland and will protect us from future price shocks of oil.

And we do that by investing and doubling down on renewables and increasing our dependency on foreign fossil fuels, be it LNG from Qatar, be it oil from Saudi Arabia, be it Colombian coal.

All of that undermines that goal of giving us energy independence.

No, we're definitely not going fast enough.

And I think the government has really taken the foot off the accelerator here in terms of rolling out those resources.

And I point to the fact that we still don't have enough experts on board Planola to actually rapidly...

decide on the applications for planning for offshore wind.

I point to the fact that our ports still aren't big enough, still aren't equipped to actually roll out the development of turbines offshore.

Belfast is the only port on the island right now that has the capacity to do that.

I point to the fact that the Celtic interconnector, which is really important for giving us energy security, giving us that contingency that we're talking about today, that would power 450,000 households

That's now two years delayed.

That came out in the Dáil there about two weeks ago.

So that's now going to be up and running in Q4 of 2028.

Previously, that was to be up and running this year.

So it's focusing on those projects, projects that give us that energy independence, give us that security, but also benefit householders.

Well, let's be clear.

What's proposed here is having converted money point from coal to oil that costs a significant amount of money.

The proposal being put forward here is to reconvert it back to coal.