Electricity (Supply) (Amendment) Bill, 1978: Second and Subsequent Stages.

Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy (Mr. O'Malley)

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

The purpose of this Bill is twofold, that is:

to give statutory authority to the ESB's existing consultancy and advisory services work; and to increase to £1,200 million the existing statutory limit of £700 million on total expenditure by the ESB for capital purposes.

Deputies will be aware that the primary function of the ESB under the Electricity Supply Acts is to ensure the adequate supply and distribution of electricity throughout the State. This is the reason for their existence and they have a standing remit from me and my predecessors to ensure that electricity is at no time in short supply. The board have a number of other functions which I need not detail but these are subsidiary to their main function.

Since their establishment over 50 years ago the ESB have themselves carried out all design work on planning of power stations and on transmission and distribution lines, in this manner gradually building up a competent body of professional and technical staff covering a wide variety of specialised fields, including areas not directly related to the electricity supply industry—for example, fisheries. Though there have been periods when demand for electricity was stagnant, over the past 50 years or so as a whole there has been a steady growth in the demand for electricity which necessitated frequent additions to generating, transmission and distribution capacity. A brief comparison of the scale of operations in recent years with the scale in the early years is instructive.

In the year ended 31 March 1930 the ESB generated 60 million units of electricity, some 43 million of which were sold to less than 50,000 customers; total revenue was less than £500,000. In the year ended 31 March 1978 the corresponding figures were 8,800 million units generated of which 7,300 million were sold to nearly one million customers, total revenue being £210 million.

The recession in recent years resulted in a fall in demand for electricity with the result that provision of new generating capacity was put off as long as possible and proposals for further expansion were deferred. With the fall-off in electricity demand the board found themselves with surplus capacity among their highly-skilled professional and technical staff. At about that time Córas Tráchtála indicated there were openings abroad for ESB expertise and, with the consent of the then Minister for Transport and Power, the board ventured into the overseas consultancy and advisory services work early in 1975. The primary purpose of this radical development was to utilise the surplus staff capacity then available in the board by taking up the slack and in this manner protect employment.

I am pleased to tell the House that the results of the board's overseas venture have been encouraging. In all, work has been undertaken for electricity utilities in 15 countries but the board's main effort has been concentrated in Bahrain and in Saudi Arabia. In Bahrain an average of up to 60 staff of all disciplines have been seconded to bring the managerial, financial and technical aspects of the Bahrain State Electricity Directorate up to international standard.

A recent report by an independent Swedish consultant recommended that the ESB be retained until an adequate standard is reached in Bahrain. I feel that this reflects creditably on the board. In Saudi Arabia the board have been appointed consultants for the management of two regional electrification schemes including tender assessment, design approvals, supervision of construction, commissioning and overall financial management of the projects. There are several other areas where the board have succeeded in winning, on merit alone, useful contracts but Deputies will probably think it unnecessary for me to indicate them in detail. Let me say, however, that the ESB are alert all the time to the possibilities inherent in selling their expertise and specialised knowledge in those areas or countries where there is a demand for them.

A satisfactory feature of the board's overseas involvement has been its extension from ESB staff going abroad on assignments to foreign staff coming to Ireland for training. For example, about 90 engineers and technicians from Nigeria have already been trained in Ireland and are now back home successfully operating a new power station there; a further 29 Nigerians are in training at present and there are good prospects, I am told, of further substantial numbers of trainees being sent here.

A major Saudi Arabian training contract has been secured with 32 staff from that country attending an English language school in Dublin for six months before undergoing a 12 months training course in the ESB. These examples serve to illustrate the wide-ranging scope of the board's activities and the possibilities that have been opened-up since they embarked on their overseas venture.

In addition to overseas consultancy and advisory services work the ESB have also engaged to some extent in consultancy work at home, in areas where they have and are known to have special expertise not otherwise available within the country. Their services have been utilised by a number of public bodies or enterprises in this country, including the Dublin Port and Docks Board, Bord Gáis and AnCO.

While the ESB have been careful not to trespass on the field traditionally served by the consulting engineering profession in Ireland and have given assurances to this effect, I am particularly concerned that there should be no cause whatever for legitimate complaint by established consultants here about the nature and extent of the board's consultancy operations. I have therefore sought and obtained from the board a positive undertaking that they will not interfere with the activities of other Irish consultants who have the competence to carry out the relevant project work in Ireland.

I am confident that this undertaking will allay any fears that may have been entertained as to the nature of the board's activities in this field. In these circumstances I am disposed to agree that the ESB should be authorised to engage in consultancy work at home to an extent consistent with full compliance with their undertaking to me. It is my intention nonetheless to keep the board's activities as consultants under periodic review.

The Bill provides that expenditure on consultancy work shall not exceed revenue and I have arranged that the ESB will prepare separate accounts for inclusion in their annual report to me which will show clearly all relevant financial aspects of their consultancy activities. In this regard I should like to mention that in the three years ending 31 March 1978 the excess of income over expenditure on consultancy work, after allowing for all salaries, expenses, promotional costs and overheads, was about £1 million. Apart from this favourable financial outturn, and the enhanced international status which we have acquired, it is worth noting that the ESB involvement in these large foreign assignments has drawn the attention of various public and private purchasing agencies to the possibilities of doing other kinds of business with Ireland, and as a result substantial exports of industrial goods have taken place to these areas.

The ESB have kept in close touch all along both with my Department and with the Department of Foreign Affairs as to their overseas activities. I will, however, be consulting with the Minister for Foreign Affairs in advance of any future commitments which the board may propose to enter into in connection with their overseas business. The Government regard this as a necessary step to ensure the closest possible cooperation and mutual understanding between the board and the Government Departments concerned.

The undertaking of consultancy work overseas does not appear to come within the ESB's statutory powers as laid down in the Electricity Supply Acts, and there may also be some doubt that such work at home is covered by existing legislation. The board have found the lack of clear statutory authority to be a disadvantage on several occasions when contracts were being negotiated. I am, therefore, promoting this legislation to eliminate any problems which the absence of statutory authority might create for the ESB in negotiating successfully for contracts or commissions.

I now come to the other purpose of this Bill which is to provide for an increase in the limit of capital expenditure by the board from £700 million to £1,200 million.

The existing statutory limit on capital expenditure by the ESB was fixed by the Electricity (Supply) Act, 1974 at £700 million. The total capital expenditure approved by the board to date has risen to a figure little short of £700 million. Whilst actual expenditure to date by the board only amounts to about £600 million or so, the standing practice is that proposals for capital expenditure are not approved by the board unless the total of the proposed expenditure, aggregated with previous expenditure and commitments to expenditure, is less than the statutory limit. As further commitments to substantial additional expenditure by the board will shortly arise it is necessary, therefore, to increase the statutory limit.

Deputies will be aware that the electricity supply industry is largely capital-intensive and that the ensuring of an adequate supply of electricity in compliance with their remit necessitates heavy levels of capital expenditure by the board virtually every year. As the lead-times with capital investments in the electricity sector tend to be long the ESB must always look well ahead when formulating their capital programme. The board tell me that, during the year ended 31 March 1978, growth in electricity demand showed an 8.2 per cent increase over the previous year and the indications are that a similar level of growth is being maintained during the current year. The ESB viewpoint, with which I broadly agree, is that they must plan ahead for an average growth rate in electricity demand of 8.5 per cent per annum over the next decade, but with an inbuilt strategy of maximum flexibility to respond to fluctuations in growth above or below the 8.5 per cent level.

The existing generating capacity of the board's system is about 2,540 megawatts. The Poolbeg station extension which is expected to come into commission later this year will add 270 MW to the system whilst a further 80 MW generating capacity will become available when the industrial dispute at Marina has concluded. The new station at Aghada, which is expected to come on-stream sometime in 1980, and the extensions to the Shannonbridge and Lanesborough stations expected to be completed about 1982-83, will between them add another 350 MW to the system. This makes for a total capacity of 3,240 MW. The cost of all new generating capacity, either already provided or in course of provision, is within the existing £700 million capital expenditure limit.

To meet the projected growth requirements over the next decade, the board expect that they will have to approve over the next two years or so of further capital expenditure totalling about £500 million on provision of new generating capacity, additional and ancillary transmission and distribution lines, new premises and other miscellaneous items. Actual expenditure of this magnitude will not, of course, arise in the next two years or so but will be spread over a number of years up to 1985 or thereabouts.

I am, therefore, providing in this Bill for an increase of £500 million in the existing statutory limit on capital expenditure by the ESB, bringing the total permitted capital outlay by the board to £1,200 million.

Before I elaborate on the purposes to which the proposed £500 million capital expenditure by the board will be put it might be useful if I reminded the House that essentially all that the ESB are proposing to do is meet expected consumer demand. Deputies are, no doubt, aware that electricity cannot be stored and that, therefore, sufficient generating capacity must always be available to the ESB to enable them to meet demands as and when it arises, if shortages of electricity with all the inconveniences and hardship that such shortages would entail are not to arise. Last year the ESB consumed 2.23 million tonnes of oil equivalent, some 67 per cent of which comprised imported oil. As of now the best available estimates suggest that the ESB will consume 5.5 MTOE by 1990. How best to meet this increased requirement is the problem. For a number of years past the ESB like most other electricity utilities, have largely relied on oil as their primary energy feedstock mainly because of its cheapness, ready availability and versatility. Oil, however, is no longer cheap and there is no guarantee as to its continued availability in the future.

In the uncertain energy world it would be foolhardy to ignore these facts; it would also be foolish to forget that oil is a finite resource and that demand for it over the world as a whole is increasing. The inescapable conclusion is that we must lessen our existing near-75 per cent level of dependence on imported oil as much as we can. In our circumstances this can best be achieved by adopting the right policies in respect of the electricity generation programme. That is why I recently sanctioned the provision of a major coal-fired station and also why I will not permit the ESB to construct any more generating stations to be fuelled by imported oil. While I am hopeful that we can arrange in the not-too-distant future inter-connection with the EEC electricity grid, with all the mutual advantages to member states to be derived therefrom, we must ensure at the same time that we have optimum diversification in our generating plant programme at home.

A large part of the £500 million proposed expenditure will be committed to the new coal-fired station which is expected to come on-stream about 1985, but there are other items and it might be helpful if I gave an approximate break-down of the total:

New coal-fired station including provision for full site development works such as jetties, roadways and buildings as well as turbines, boilers and ancillary equipment for 2 × 300 MW units, £350 million; Distribution system arising out of the need to provide electricity supply to an additional 25-30,000 customers each year, £60 million; Transmission lines to provide improved supply to consumers, especially in outlying areas, £20 million; Premises such as new district and area offices, and related items, £20 million; Miscellaneous, including provision for peak-load plant—small turbines—to meet sudden heavy demands for electricity, £50 million.

This break-down is indicative only, and not definitive, but what I should like to make clear to Deputies is that no provision is being made at this stage for capital expenditure on the ESB nuclear project. Though this project was approved in principle by the then Government almost exactly five years ago there is no question of it now being proceeded with until the Government have fully assessed all the energy options now open to us, and made up their mind as to the nature and extent of the generating capacity needed to meet our expected electricity needs in the coming decade and beyond. In this regard I have been impressed by the public reaction generally to, and understanding of, our major energy problems following the publication some months ago of the Energy-Ireland discussion document. As I have already indicated any submission by interested parties on this very important question will be fully considered by the Government.

As I have already indicated elsewhere I will be putting my proposals in the matter to the Government in the near future. If the Government should decide not to over-rule the existing decision of the last Government and that the ESB nuclear project should be processed further in accordance with the 1973 decision, a period of 18 to 24 months to permit of assembling of the ESB nuclear team, updating of plans and preparation of specifications, inviting tenders and so on will elapse from the date of the Government decision before there will be any question of acceptance of tenders and thus of an irrevocable commitment to the project arising. I wish to make it very clear that before this final commitment stage is reached it will be necessary to place before the Oireachtas proposals to increase the ESB capital expenditure limits to cover nuclear station costs. Deputies are thus guaranteed an opportunity for full debate on this issue before there can be any commitment by the ESB to building a nuclear station.

I commend the Bill to the House.

Mr. Kelly

I wish to begin by taking up a couple of points which in the over-all context of the Minister's speech may be relatively marginal. We are all glad to hear that the ESB who are the earliest and one of the most successful of our State-supported and State-promoted monopolies, should be so well thought of that they are able to sell their skill in many foreign countries. However, I would like a little more detail in regard to what proportion of this export of skill is under the heading of Overseas Development Aid. Presumably the skill sold to Saudi Arabia, for instance, would not come under that heading because that country is not a recipient of development aid in the ordinary sense of the word. I am aware that the ESB have had training contacts with Nigeria but that country is not in the category of the poorer type of nation for which development aid is designed. This contact, so far as it consists of exporting skills has been paid for out of funds which represent part of our Overseas Development Aid Programme. In other words, some of the money we spend on development aid, we are paying back to ourselves in the shape of subsidising the employment of our semi-State bodies in passing on skills and expertise to countries who have not sufficient expertise of their own. I am not making any particular point on this but I would have liked the Minister's speech to have included a paragraph indicating the proportion of this business which represents business we are undertaking in the context of our Overseas Development Aid Programme.

Another point which arises and which in the over-all context may be only marginal although of very great importance when considered separately, relates to the coal-fired station to which the Minister has referred and for which the major part of this increased expenditure will be earmarked. The individual items to which the Minister adverted such as premises, jetties, site developments, boilers, ancillary equipment and so on amount to a cost of £350 million. Do the ESB envisage an identifiable sum for pollution control because the pollutant ingredient of a coal-fired station is extremely high? Inherent in it are hazards which although different from the hazards associated with nuclear reactors, are even greater as I have heard the Minister say, than the hazards associated with nuclear reactors. Pollution control is an expensive business and that is why I would like to have heard something about the degree to which this £350 million is to be devoted to this aspect of the matter.

Mr. O'Malley

About £20 million.

Mr. Kelly

Of the £350 million?

Mr. O'Malley

Yes.

Mr. Kelly

I am not quarrelling in that regard but is this situation acceptable to Clare County Council and to the planning board?

Mr. O'Malley

I believe it is but the station will be one of the cleanest coal stations in these islands.

Mr. Kelly

I am glad to hear that. Regarding the Minister's over-all comments on the energy situation, he raised the question of the energy discussion document issued by his Department in July. Therefore, I may be permitted to refer to that document and to say something about the options before us and which are mentioned in this document. As a document it is about as lucid as is possible in terms of being understood by the layman. I detect at least two different hands in its compilation. I suspect that the introduction was written by somebody other than the person who wrote the body of it because the introduction is written with less general care than is the case in relation to the other part. However, the body of the document is helpful to the layman and, naturally, I include myself in that category. The whole document is well put together but it is too simple. While it constitutes a fair enough effort at informing the public in a very general way as to what are the problems before us, it is not nearly detailed enough to give the experts enough to get their teeth into it. The criticism I have heard from people who are qualified to judge in that regard is that there is much too little detail and that in order to enable technical judgment to be made about it by people who are technically expert, it would need to be several times the length and equipped with a great number of tables and appendices so that they could verify for themselves the correctness of the projections about efficiency, conversion. growth in GNP, the relationship between growth in GNP and growth in energy requirements, on which the document is based. There is no unanimity about these projections. There is a divergence of up to 50 per cent between the views of different experts as to the rate at which growth in GNP is accompanied by growth in energy demands. For the subeditor or the newspaper correspondent whose job it is to make this stuff intelligible to the general reader this document is very good. For the expert reader, the person on whose judgment we and the Minister will ultimately rely, it is not detailed enough. We would not have complained had we got a much fuller, more elaborate and, naturally, more expensive document. We have had such things, perhaps not in as technical a region. The State has often spent very lavish sums of money on research which was supposed to be the basis for future policy. The research done in education in the 1960s is a very good instance of that and so is the research done into the public service. On a matter so emotional, sensitive and important—as is admitted by all sides and even by those who disagree with everything the Minister does—it would not have been out of place had a more elaborate document been introduced.

The Minister was requested to produce this discussion document Energy-Ireland which is not expected to be as elaborate as something on which a commission has laboured for five or ten years. I was one of the people pressing the Minister to produce this. The judgment I hear passed about it is that the detail in it is insufficient and it is not possible to form judgments on much of what the paper contains because the bases on which the judgment assumptions rest are not transparent—they are not capable of being evaluated.

There are some details which I found surprising in that document. One is its assumptions in regard to the country's economic growth. I do not want to be regarded as pessimistic, but the projections, are based on the continuing pretty high growth level uninterrupted by any kind of a hiccough for the next 15 years or thereabouts. Even accompanied by the qualification that they may or may not be reached, I would be very slow to plan any expensive, elaborate, controversial energy programme on them. A somewhat more modest assumption in regard to GNP would have been appropriate. The reply to that may be that, had that proved to be unfounded and had more modest projections been exceeded, that would have left us with an energy deficit which might have been impossible to remedy at short notice. That reply, although in theory reasonable, does not lie in the mouths of those who prepared this document. On page 24 they are speaking about the relationship between growth in energy consumption and growth in GNP, and I quote:

Essentially, we are concerned with determining what must be done to meet the expected energy demands by 1990 while at the same time avoiding the over-provision, or over-planting, as it is called, of generating equipment. It is felt that the higher growth rate situation postulated above, i.e. 24 MTOE by 1990 could be met by special or ad hoc arrangements in the mid 1980's and so need not be developed further in this document.

That is much higher than the ones they are working on, which is about 18 MTOE and the lower level which they were assuming was something like 15 MTOE. One would have liked some indication about what kind of special or ad hoc arrangements will get us the equivalent at very short notice of several million tons of oil equivalent per year.

The document is deficient in regard to the energy conservation side. The chapter about energy conservation is well-written and interesting, but again it goes into far too little detail and makes far too few assumptions about what is within the power of any Government to do. For example, there is not enough about the impact which a proper programme of energy conservation on dwelling-houses would have. In domestic use in this country an enormous proportion of our energy is consumed, a proportion roughly equivalent to that which industry takes up. A substantial phase-in here, particularly on heating, would have a visible and significant impact on our overall energy situation. It has often been said here in the House and outside, that a discussion document like this might have found more room for explaining what the Government might do in this regard, what they should do and what they were making up their minds to do.

There are a couple of comical things in the conservation section to which I want to draw the attention of the House. They talk about conservation efforts, utilisation of waste heat, district heating and so on. The only specific reference is to the Ballymun project in which it says that shortcomings of various kinds will need to be corrected in further applications of the concept. There is nothing about what the Government aim to do now by way of a positive programme for utilising waste heat from large plants in such a way as to channel it into adjacent housing or into a simple industrial enterprise like a fish farm or a glasshouse. I realise that we do not have the housing density or the long, severe winters of countries which are very far ahead with research on this kind of work, such as Denmark.

Simply as a matter of tactics, this discussion document is leaving a very exposed flank from the Government's point of view vis-à-vis their critics of whom I am one in a general way but I am not as severe as the people who have a combination of anti-nuclear and conserving the resources of the earth type of interests. The Government should say what we might do and not merely tell us what other people do or what in a general way may be theoretically possible.

A comical, or perhaps pathetic, part of this chapter is paragraph 7.3, which talks about Government policies which had effects on energy conservation. This is an extract, and I quote from page 49:

Even before the energy crisis in 1973-74 there were a number of Government policies which had effects on energy conservation. These included such things as taxation of petrol....

Can you beat it? Taxation of petrol. I must say, if that is a claim to be included in a list of conservation measures, so too is poverty or so too is physical disability which makes it impossible for a person to drive a car. To trot out what was always thought of before as a purely fiscal revenue raising measure in the context of a document on conservation would make a cat laugh. But that is not the worst of it.

These included such things as taxation of petrol as well as grants for fuel efficiency surveys in industry. Since the crisis further steps have been taken by the Government. Boiler efficiency tests have been subsidised. Grants are provided by the IDA to industry towards improved expenditure on equipment which will reduce energy usage. The IDA also provides grants towards labour and material costs for research and development projects which have a significant technical input aimed at conserving energy. Bord Fáilte have somewhat similar grant schemes for hotels and guesthouses. Petrol taxation has been increased.

There was a great deal of trouble here when the oil crisis arose. It was alleged the Government were using it as an excuse to raise revenue by putting 15p on the gallon of petrol. Oddly enough, the incoming Government have not been falling over themselves to take that 15p off again. It was never represented by Deputy R. Ryan, Minister for Finance, or anybody else as a conservation measure and neither was the conservation aspect of it more than marginally discussed. It is perfectly true, of course, that if you make driving more expensive, apart from taxation measures, you are forcing people to conserve energy and I suppose that is a beneficial by-product.

What then is to be said about a policy of remitting taxation on cars? What then is to be said in the context of conservation, which we are talking about here, of a policy which makes it cheaper for people to drive and which makes young people that much quicker and more easily able to acquire cars? And what can be said about a fiscal policy which puts so much consumer spending into the pockets of the public so that the most conspicuous single result in the market of the Government's first budget at the beginning of this year is an enormous increase in the number of cars on the road and an enormous increase in the number of car registrations? If I were ruled out of order in regard to bringing up this matter I would have submitted gracefully were it not for the fact that this Green Paper trots out the imposition and the increasing of petrol taxation as a conservation measure. If that is a conservation measure then the remission of car tax and the general policy of the Government in buying votes at the last election has had the effect of squandering energy and that is one of the most conspicuous effects it has had.

I will not go on about that any longer. I hope I have made the point sufficiently; but this is, I think, probably the most ineffective chapter in what is overall quite an informative, at least for the layman, document. I would have wished this document to say that the Government had got, and explained what they were, positive projects in mind and were going to go through with positive projects for subsidising schemes of insulation in private houses to a degree further than is now done, of obliging the improvement of building standards to a stage where the heat loss would be as small as it is in Denmark. In case it is objected that that would put building costs up, let me say immediately that will not be acceptable on this side of the House as an excuse when we find that, although building costs have risen by 10 per cent since this Government got into office, the price of houses has risen by 23 per cent. If there are additional costs involved in compulsorily including further heat conservation in building the Minister ought to absorb that cost himself and the Government, through the Minister responsible, should make certain that he does so.

It was only this morning I got in my morning post a document signed by, I think, your good self or, if not by you, by the Ceann Comhairle and the Cathaoirleach of the Seanad imploring Deputies bilingually to turn lights off after them in the House, not to keep electrical equipment running when it was not required, and so on. That, of course, is all very laudable even though the amount of energy saved in turning off strip lighting is extremely small. I could have done without the document asking me to turn lights off if I thought these—I do not want to belittle them—essentially marginal hortatory measures were going to do something which had a bit of bite in it towards conserving the energy that pours out through our buildings, through our windows and our poorly built walls, from October to April year in and year out.

There are two general remarks I want to make and I hope that what I say now will not be taken as offensive because it is not meant that way. In fact, in a curious way I think it is a compliment to the ESB personnel. I feel, and I think the feeling is shared by others, that many of the officials in the advice they give in regard to the development of new energy sources, particularly in the case of the nuclear project, are so keen on their subject and so in love with it—that is very commendable—that they cannot wait to get their hands on a new technology. That is as it should be. If they were indifferent and apathetic it would be a very bad thing. But I think that it is an element which, in evaluating the energy programme and the choice before us, the Minister must to some extent discount. He must make allowance for the fact that there is a certain professional enthusiasm, entirely praiseworthy, which has unavoidably and automatically crept into the advice he is getting. While I am not saying the advice is not correct—it may well be—that element ought to be politely borne in mind and recognised to be, as it is, the product of the ESB engineers having their hearts in the right place and having an interest in their job. At the same time it is an element which might unconsciously dispose them to a degree of enthusiasm for a new technology which perhaps other considerations, economic considerations in particular, do not necessarily warrant our adopting in the near future.

The second comment I want to make—and again I do not mean it in any offensive sense and I have to rely on a secondhand opinion because I cannot judge it for myself—is that I have encountered the view that the Minister does not dispose within his Department of the necessary overall expertise to advise him on these matters. I cannot expect his Department to be expert on everything and, whatever expertise is there, one cannot expect it to be above a certain sort of general level. I do not want to be taken as critical of his Department. I am certain everyone there is good at his job and does his best, but I would not be doing my job properly if I did not pass on the opinion I have heard expressed that the volume and the quality of the advice on matters such as nuclear development within the Minister's Department is not of the level he ought to have available to him in making important decisions about our future.

The last thing I want to say is inspired by the Minister's admission—I am very glad he made it in his opening speech rather than have it dragged out of him—that it will take 18 months to two years from the moment the Government decide to stand by the programme provisionally set in motion by the former Government to give the ESB a green light for the construction of a nuclear station. If there is 18 months or two years I strongly urge the Minister to spend the first part of that time in holding a public inquiry into the necessity for a nuclear station. I have said this so often that I fear I may be misunderstood, but the Party I represent are not against nuclear development.

I am not aware of any body of opinion within the Fine Gael Party which is, on principle, against nuclear development. It could hardly be otherwise because a Government consisting mostly of the Fine Gael Party and a Fine Gael Minister initiated it, although there was a built-in brake to the programme they initiated which included the planning programme on which the ESB were directed to embark in 1973 immediately after the outbreak of the oil crisis. The Fine Gael Party do not have basic apprehensions of principle in regard to nuclear development. I and my Party are certainly willing to go a long way in making an act of faith in the competence of the ESB to ensure that any development, whether nuclear or not, will be as safe as possible.

On the other hand—I am afraid that as soon as one says "on the other hand" he will be accused of sitting on the fence, although I am not sitting on the fence about this—the Minister is making a serious political mistake, not in the narrow party sense but in a much broader sense, in the attitude which he has taken over the last year towards public demands for an enquiry into the proposed plant at Carnsore or wherever else it might be if there are planning permission difficulties in Carnsore. The public demands have a most unusual distinction in that they are being articulated in The Irish Press which in the ordinary way can be relied on to put up as good a case as they can for whatever Fianna Fáil is up to, although to be fair to them they have been more independent in the last few years than they previously were. Only on rare occasions does this paper dissent from or show displeasure for what the Fianna Fáil Party is doing. However, The Irish Press seemed to wear an expression of contempt the morning after the vote on the contraception issue here in 1974, directed against the party which whipped its members through against the Bill. There are one or two other occasions I can recall, but by and large they tend to fall into the ranks of the soldiers of destiny easily enough and they do not seem to be too worried about the rights and wrongs of a case. This is one of the rare occasions on which they have said that they feel the Minister is wrong. That gives these demands directed against a Fianna Fáil Government a special cachet which public demands normally do not have.

The Minister's attitude to these demands is wrong. It has not occurred recently, but about a year ago I remember the Minister sneering at the people who were protesting against nuclear development. Deputy O'Malley spent some time as Minister for Justice, and this and his other experiences have probably predisposed him to think that some people will protest no matter what is done: that they are in the protesting business and they cannot be made happy. The Minister is right up to a point. I do not delude myself that one inquiry or 50 inquiries into a nuclear development could convince everybody. I know there will be last ditch people who are emotionally predisposed against this development no matter what the Minister does. That feature was probably uppermost in the Minister's mind when he refused to hold this inquiry. The Minister probably believes that there is no point in holding an enquiry because in the end the Government will have to make a decision which will be just as sticky as it is now. The inquiry will probably necessitate the spending of a lot of money, will raise a lot of dust, will encourage false hopes, but ultimately the decision will still have to be made by the Government. In this age when a Government is faced with a decision like this which for reasons which are buried in childhood with a lot of people, which is extremely sensitive, emotional and explosive in the general sense, considerations of the kind I have mentioned ought not to be as final as they might be in a different age or in a different context. The Government will be a loser no matter what happens. If my Government were in office they would have been losers too. We would probably have made a decision which would have been unpopular with a large section of the population no matter what we had done. I realise the disagreeable nature of the dilemma the Minister thinks he is in, but my advice is that he should hold an inquiry because many people are honestly apprehensive about this development.

Many people write to me, and I suppose to other Deputies, saying that they are against a nuclear station and that they want us to add our voices against it. I have always made it clear that I will not add my voice to the campaign against the nuclear station, on principle. Among the people who write, a considerable proportion are absolutely honest, moderate and reasonable; they are not last ditch merchants or persons in the business of protesting. For the sake of those people who are simply apprehensive about this, and they are entitled to feel apprehensive about what they feel might be prejudicial to their lives, and the lives of their children and grandchildren, the Government should take every step possible to instruct and debate and to permit others to debate this issue. I know that the newspapers are open and that anyone can make a speech about this subject any day of the week, that weekends can be arranged, that bus loads of people can come down to Carnsore and camp and demonstrate, and that the country is alsolutely free so far as debate and discussion are concerned. That is undoubted and we need not waste time on it, but the Minister is being asked to take part in the debate to show that he has an open mind. He is being asked to take on the disposition of a judge who mounting a bench, perhaps, although naturally and in general is absolutely disposed against crime, will none the less give a fair chance to the accused person in front of him. He may have a preconception of the type of crime alleged or the type of accused in the dock but he is able to put that to one side for the duration of the trial. That is what is being asked of the Minister.

I would not lay much money on the chance that the Minister will change his mind, or that his advisers will change their minds, but they are being asked to make an effort to do so and give the people who disagree with them, whatever their disposition, whether they are honest and sincere, as I believe the majority of them are, or otherwise, an opportunity to make their case in public and cross-examine the Minister's experts. They should be given an opportunity to extract from the Minister's experts the details which the paper I have referred to does not contain and of extracting from them statements about policy which are missing from that paper also.

The only apprehension I have about the thing, something which I would like to see thrashed out at such an inquiry, is the economic dimension of this undertaking. In 1977 the cost of a nuclear station was put at £350 million, roughly, and it is clear from the wording of the paper I referred to that the people who compiled it know that that is a low estimate for today. For all I know it could be twice or three times that sum before it is built. We are getting accustomed to talking about large sums of money here, but with regard to this station we are talking about staggering sums in the context of what we can afford. Yesterday the Dáil spent three hours wrangling with the Minister for the Environment about his unwillingness to subsidise the abolition of water rates in the areas which always pay them separate from the ordinary rate, but the amount involved was only £1.2 million. The Government are so stuck for money that they cannot find it within them to complete the remission of domestic rates by adding this small item to their free gift. I must ask myself then how they come to be so airy about sums which could be up to £1 billion by the time the station is finished. I would like to see that point argued.

In connection with the safety element I am willing to make an act of faith in the competence of the ESB in this regard, but I should like to see a debate as to whether economically this thing is absolutely necessary, because it is a much more expensive type of station than the coal-burning ones. I would like to know if we could possibly get on without such a station, without abandoning the objective, with which I completely agree, of diversifying our energy sources and not leaving ourselves dependent on imported energy fuels.

I urge the Minister to think again about this. It is probable that his officials will tell him that there is no provision in any of the Acts dealing with the ESB, or other legislation, for such an inquiry; it cannot be a sworn inquiry in the normal sense because there is no scandal, accident or any of the usual things such inquiries involve and there is no precedent for such an inquiry. I accept that there is no precedent and offhand I cannot think of a statutory dress which one could throw around this inquiry, but does that matter? The people who would put their case at such an inquiry will not care whether there is an Act of 50 pages on which the thing rests; they want to know if they have the ear and the open mind of the Government when putting their case. I will not be one of those protesters and I do not think my party, as a party, will be there trying to twist the Government's arm about this, but I would like to see the inquiry demonstrate the economic necessity of such a development. Others would like to get that information also, whether or not the inquiry has a statutory basis, is an ad hoc structure, or is conducted under the lines of an Act or because the Minister makes a hall in the Customs House or the Round Room in the Mansion House free for a few months while this is held.

In a speech I made about this some months ago I used some over-colourful expressions and The Irish Press, in one of its editorials, complained about the fact that I forecast a Tokyo airport situation if the Government persisted in treating people with the offhand sneering contempt with which this Minister, I am afraid, has occasionally encountered his critics and those who are apprehensive about the nuclear programme. I was not literally trying to predict a Tokyo airport situation on Carnsore. I may have said so in a sentence, and if so I hope it will be discounted as a piece of rhetoric, which is all it was. The Tokyo airport situation is relevant to what we are talking about because it is a symbol of the capacity of the modern world for generating fierce, violent emotions in the matter of conservation and preserving the quality of life. That would have seemed unthinkable in the railway age; it would have seemed unthinkable to the age that threw the loop line across the Liffey and it would have seemed unthinkable even to the age that built the ESB buildings in Merrion Street which Brian Lenihan thought could be improved with a lick of paint. It would have seemed unthinkable even ten years ago, but it is more than thinkable now.

I should like to repeat that the protest groups, the Friends of the Earth, and the other groups of which the Minister thinks so little, have conducted themselves up to now with absolute model respect for democracy, the law and everything else. I could not fault any of them, nor could the Minister. There has been no trace of disorder, violence or aggressiveness about the way these protests have been put. I would like to see it kept that way, and while it would be wrong of me to make predictions—perhaps it was wrong of me to drag Tokyo airport into this—the relevance of that is that we are dealing with an area of controversy which can generate these things. It is the Government's job to try to foresee such things and head them off. While the protests and anxieties about nuclear development which have been expressed here in the last two years have not got past the stage of being polite debate let alone having reached the stage of being worrying, it is the Minister's job to make sure that that remains the situation. I urge him to accept that the best way to make sure that the situation remains so is to concede a demand which can be conceded without loss of face, humiliation or damage. The demand for an inquiry is reasonable and I believe it would satisfy the reasonable and moderate section of the people who are so concerned. The Minister will never satisfy some sections, but the duty of a decent Government is to make sure that the people with reasonable apprehensions and with a reasonable demand have them set at rest.

I should like to remind the Minister of an occasion ten or 12 years ago in Cork when the present Minister for Fisheries was occupying the Department of Justice. At that time a man died in police custody in the Bridewell in Cork and the post mortem on him showed that he had injuiries to his ribs, spleen and liver which were consistent with his having been beaten up or kicked in the Garda station. The inquest lasted three days and the verdict returned was one of accidental death. There was uproar all over the country and the kind of people interested in such things made what noise they could. This occurred before the present phase of the IRA had been heard of and at a time when there was not a subversive showing his nose; it was at a time of the deepest peace. The line taken by the Irish Association for Civil Liberties, of which I am a member, the other bodies in existence at that time, and private individuals, was that this was not clear. They felt that this death may have been caused by the ill-treatment of this heavily drunken man while in custody in the Bridewell late that evening.

Deputy Lenihan stonewalled for two or three months until people who had never heard of the case were up in arms about it. When newspapers were editorialising about it, and processions were being held about it Mr. Lenihan stonewalled and stonewalled and said that he was absolutely satisfied that the police had done nothing out of the way and that the thing was an accident, that the inquest did represent and already represented a public inquiry and that it had resulted in the establishment of an accidental death. The storm grew so intense that Mr. Lynch, who was Taoiseach in those days, must have twisted Mr. Lenihan's arm because in the end he conceded, with a great deal of loss of face, what he could have conceded in the beginning with no loss.

A public inquiry was set up, chaired by a judge of the High Court, as far as I remember, with a justice of the District Court and a Circuit Court judge. These three judges sat not for three days, as the inquest had sat, but for three weeks, and they finally produced a report which they printed and published and which included photographs, in particular a photograph of a large bar stool from which the deceased had been shown to have fallen earlier that evening. They came to the conclusion that they were certain that the man had died accidentally. He had fallen most unluckily in between the steel legs of this stool which had had the effect of crushing his ribs and of inflicting the other internal injuries. Nobody can be 100 per cent sure of anything but they were satisfied that the death had been accidental. Like that, the protest ceased. The following morning there was not a word about the case any more. From that good day to this I have never heard another allegation to the effect that that man died from anything other than by accident.

I know this is an incident taken from a quite different field but I would like the Minister to reflect on that. It is a superb example of how conceding a reasonable demand in regard to an inquiry can set genuine anxieties at rest. It has a political advantage for the Government because they hear no more about it. But of course in 1967 they paid a political penalty in the sense that that Minister collected some part of the mud which a Minister occasionally collects in his official life because of his very long insistence that no inquiry was necessary. It did turn out to be necessary, and the main beneficiaries of it were the Gardaí themselves who were now shown to be what everyone wanted them to be shown to be, innocent in the matter.

There are lessons to be learnt from that story of 10 or 12 years ago. I certainly will not embarrass the Minister and I will certainly will not sneer at him or gloat if he does change his mind, but I do urge the Minister to set up an inquiry. There will be nothing in it for him but credit if he does. He need not have inflated expectations of what this inquiry may do. I know he will be disappointed in a sense no matter what happens, but he will at least have given to the reasonable people of the country—and there are very many of them—who are anxious about nuclear development here a chance to make themselves heard, and he will have given them a chance also to speak directly to the Government and with some hope that the Government's open mind on this matter may be influenced by what they say.

Mr. B. Desmond

This Bill is a very useful opportunity to review the energy development policy of the Government and of the ESB and in the process it gives us an opportunity of giving statutory power to the ESB in relation to consultancy and advisory services work. I welcome the entry of the ESB into consultancy work abroad and I would hope to see their consultancy work here extended also.

I am aware of a good deal of the work done by the ESB staff who are abroad at present, notably in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Some of our friends are in Saudi Arabia and I certainly have a great deal of admiration for the work being done by the professional staff of the ESB in these areas. They have an excellent liaison with the Irish Embassy in that area and as the Minister has pointed out the ESB has, from its general consultancy work, made a profit of some £1 million up to 31 March of this year. I would hope to see that work extended to other parts of the Third World, the underdeveloped world and indeed to the developed nations, because there is a valuable reservoir of expertise in many professions within the ESB and indeed within other State-sponsored bodies. There is no reason in the wide world why Irish people should not go abroad and undertake such consultancy work. I am also pleased that we are now in a position to welcome trainees from both Nigeria and Saudi Arabia into the operations of the Board here. When one considers the tremendous growth and work in this area by both Aer Lingus and the ESB and also the other State-sponsored bodies over recent years it augurs well for the success of Irish professional skills abroad.

With regard to the comments made by the Minister in relation to consultancy work in Ireland I do not necessarily share his views about the assurances that he has sought from the ESB with regard to internal consultancy work. What is wrong, in practice, with the professional staffs of the ESB competing internally in Ireland for consultancy contracts and consultancy operations? Why should the Minister have obtained, as he sought and obtained, a positive undertaking from the ESB that they will not interfere with the activities of other Irish consultants who have the competence to carry out the relevant project work in Ireland? What is so sacrosanct about the work of private consultants in this country engaged in work on their own account? Why should the ESB be precluded from entering into competitive tender and availing of such work? Indeed I would say to the Minister that when some private firm goes bang in some sector in this country the first Minister to run to the State-sponsored bodies is no less than the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy saying: "Can you bail them out? Do you think you may be able to take over part of their operations?" Yet when the glove is on the other hand the board is apparently precluded from entering into activities in this field. Personally I am in favour of job creation and the full utilisation of all our State-sponsored activities both in the public and private sector.

The ESB should be encouraged to sell electrical appliances commercially and sell professional expertise abroad and on the Irish market provided they are doing this on a competitive basis and that they are not unfairly undercutting other operators. It is not very often that I seek out points of disagreement with the Minister but I do not agree with him when he says that the ESB must not trespass into the field traditionally served by the consultancy engineering profession in Ireland. What is so sacrosanct about that profession? Do they provide a cheaper, better or more efficient service than the engineering profession of the ESB? It is arguable if one looks at some of the large scale projects in the country and some of the phenomenally high prices quoted in relation to consultancy engineering.

I have strong reservations in relation to domestic consultancy work. The ESB should be free to engage in international and domestic consultancy tendering without any reservations. We have got to take the shackles off the ESB in regard to that matter because they have plenty of expertise which can make a valuable contribution in the national interest without unduly impinging on the ordinary activities of the domestic consultancy profession. A bit of competition between them would be a good thing.

With regard to the general provisions of the Bill and the extension of the capital expenditure of the board from £700 million to £1,200 million, this is an opportunity to put on record some particular points I would like to make about the aspects raised by the Minister in his speech. The view of the Labour Party is that our energy policy must aim to ensure that adequate and secure supplies of energy are available for all consumers at a reasonable price. I accept that our economic and social development, above all, the creation of full employment, will require increased energy supplies. In saying that I do not share what I regard as a very complacent approach by the Government to the means to be adopted in achieving those objectives. The objective of increased energy supply must be achieved with the least possible risk to the health and safety of our people and our environment.

It is for that reason that I have strongly supported the holding of a full public inquiry into the nuclear options outlined by the Minister in the Government's discussion document published earlier this year. I deplore the decision of the Minister and the Government not to hold such an inquiry despite the great importance of the issues involved and that a substantial majority of the people are in favour of holding such an inquiry. A decision to construct a nuclear station here should not be taken until the most fundamental problem relating to such a station is resolved, namely the question of a nuclear waste disposal system. This has not been satisfactorily resolved so far in any country in any part of the world. During the past 12 months I have tried to read up as much of the available literature as I could. I have spoken to parliamentarians of the Council of Europe and I have visited generating stations. I have been assured that as yet no satisfactory system has been found for the disposal of nuclear waste. Until that problem is resolved I believe the Government should not take a decision to construct a nuclear power station.

The Minister took about six dives forward in his discussion paper but this morning he has taken some steps backwards in saying that it will be some considerable time yet before a decision is taken but that he is on the point of putting proposals before the Government. I feel, therefore, that we should convey our views sharply to him. My party believe that our oil and gas exploration programme must be accelerated. We must seek out further oil and gas fields We must seek substantial aid from the EEC to do this. I do not believe we have sufficient internal financial resources to undertake this work which is very costly and very risky. EEC aid would enable us to become self-sufficient in time from such finds and even to become a net exporter of such products.

We should make a further effort to get this aid from the EEC and next season we should double our oil and gas exploration programme. This is possible because some of the finds have been encouraging, as the Minister admitted, and there is no reason why that development could not, in some measure, offset his headlong rush towards setting up a nuclear power station here.

I support the construction of fuel-fired generating stations on the Shannon Estuary and the ESB should consider siting further such stations on the southeast coast. I am reasonably convinced that with the development of modern coal-fired dual-purpose technology the environmental problems can be very substantially mitigated and that the extent to which the industry was regarded as a very dirty industry, in terms of electricity generating, has also been mitigated to a considerable degree in recent years. That will assist us in not necessarily having to avail of a nuclear option. That is an option which we should least wish to avail of on safety, environmental and capital expenditure grounds because in my view the other options are more rational and easier to cope with and far less expensive.

The Government should promote the development of these interconnected links with the Community electricity grid through the UK network. The Minister recently replied to a Dáil question put down by me giving some costings, admittedly of a tentative nature, but there is no reason why we should not get over our xenophobia in relation to a direct electricity connection with the UK and thus availing of the connection with the Community. That would be a very valuable and useful connection and would have a reasonable degree of security and diversification of Irish electricity supply.

There is need for a sustained and rigorous national conservation programme. This is primarily the responsibility of the ESB, of the Government, by way of statutory powers, and of the other energy suppliers. It is a matter of concern that in Ireland at present we hear a great deal of talk about scarce energy resources when the consumption of imported petrol and refined petrol here has rocketed to a phenomenal extent. This has arisen out of Government policy. We cannot have, on the one hand, a Government whining about the profligate use of energy resources and, on the other, encouraging car ownership and car purchase as this Government did in the last election. I strongly urge that there is a need for the development of a very rigorous national programme.

As yet, the Irish people are casual in their use of such resources. Needless to remark, in the forthcoming budget petrol will probably be £1 a gallon. This might have some effect on conservation but the growth of petrol consumption here in the past 12 months makes a mockery of any question of a national conservation programme and, of course, in the process that affects our balance of trade.

The Government should also increase their participation in a financial allocation towards research programmes for the development of alternative energy systems in which there is a great deal of interest. While in the inmediate future they do not hold out much hope of making a major contribution within the next five or ten years, nevertheless, the Government should make a substantial financial research investment in such alternatives. This would be widely welcomed by the scientific community and by those who have a particular interest in the area of energy supply. The Government, therefore, have an opportunity of revising their policy in relation to the development of energy generation.

I want to repeat our view in relation to the question of the nuclear option. There is no doubt that the proposal that we should opt for a nuclear power station to meet a major proportion of our expected energy growth is very controversial. Within the extremes of the debate on this issue two-points clearly emerge. First, there is a widespread and justifiable public concern about the possible consequences for this and future generations should we proceed to construct a nuclear station in any part of the country. That concern largely centres around the problems of storage and disposal of nuclear waste products. Most Members of the Oireachtas and the public at large were not sufficiently well informed on the issue involved to make a reasoned and final judgment on the matter. That is why I was concerned about the precipitate decision of the Minister not to have a public inquiry but to go blandly ahead and give the ESB initial authorisation. I think that was a very unwise decision and one which the Minister should not have opted for at this stage.

The information provided in the discussion document on the costs of nuclear generation is now dated and inadequate. The document—Energy Ireland—made clear how rapidly the costs of nuclear plants have risen. In 1973 it was estimated that a nuclear plant would cost about £120 million. The 1977 cost is £350 million. I have no doubt that even if the ESB were given construction authorisation to proceed now, by the time we would be ready to undertake such work, the mid-eighties, the cost would be well into £600 or £700 million. It is not clear in those estimates what associated costs have been included. We do not know the cost of land. Neither do we know the interest charges during construction nor the cost of such items as design, administration, storage and transmission or regulation and security services. Neither do we know the system reserve margin. None of these costings has been picked up in any tentative way by the Government nor have they been undertaken to any extent by the ESB. Therefore, I am very sceptical about the need for such a station. Perhaps other diversification measures would provide the balance we need. In these circumstances I am calling for a public inquiry into the matter. Such an inquiry would afford an opportunity both to those in favour and to those opposed to the plan to put their case in the context of reasoned public and democratic debate. If the Government arrive at a decision on this issue, and this seems likely, without the benefit of such an inquiry, the consequences could be very harmful. We witnessed recently the way in which a small group of people, however ill-advised and whatever may have been the exercise of their lawful rights, can undermine major undustrial investment. If the legitimate and understandable concern of a substantial number of people regarding the nuclear option are brushed aside by the Government and if these people are denied democratic participation in decisions, the planning and construction of any future generating capacity in the years ahead could be jeopardised seriously. The Government should bear our views in mind in this regard.

In these circumstances I am of the firm opinion that it would be most unwise and unjustifiable to proceed to a decision at Government level to construct a nuclear power station because principally of the serious shortcomings in present nuclear waste and disposal technology. Regardless of who one speaks with, with the exception perhaps of those who are totally in favour of nuclear energy and even they have many reservations, one finds a clear recognition that both within the developed and the developing world the waste disposal aspect of nuclear energy is inadequate in terms of ensuring long-term public safety at an acceptable level of risk. That is why in so many countries—Australia, Germany, Canada, and others—there has been massive opposition to the construction of nuclear stations. It is a point of considerable importance that that opposition won through.

There is need for massive research and development expenditure in regard to this issue before a decision is reached. I do not think that even the most committed supporter of the nuclear option would argue that that stage has been reached. If there emerges a solution to the nuclear waste disposal problem and if at that time the projected demand-and-supply situation should warrant proceeding with the construction of a large, perhaps 650 MW station, and if the design of such a station were deemed to be of rigidly high standards in relation to public safety and health, the construction could be a viable proposition. But if these conditions could not be satisfied—as of now they are not capable of being satisfied—a decision to construct should be deferred until the conditions could be met. This would be the sensible approach on the part of the Government.

Mr. Bruton

With the permission of the Ceann Comhairle, I wish to raise on the adjournment the subject matter of Question No. 513 of Tuesday, 7 November.

An Ceann Comhairle

The Chair will communicate with the Deputy.

Mr. B. Desmond

Regarding the question of the inter-connection with the EEC electricity grid, I am concerned that the discussion document appeared to dismiss to a degree the possibility of getting a substantial part of our future energy requirements in this way through the main British electricity network. It is argued in the document that we would risk loss of national control by entrusting to non-Irish utilities the provision of a substantial part of our future electricity needs. It is argued also that there are practical economic objections to any such proposal although these objections are not outlined in any detail. It is argued, too, that the importation of a major part of our future electricity requirements would not be a realistic option.

I accept that these arguments have a quasi-political appeal but I am not convinced that they accord with economic realities. We have very little by way of indigenous energy resources and it seems that we shall have to depend largely on imported energy for the foreseeable future, regardless of whether that energy is in the form of oil, gas or ultimately uranium and whether it is imported on a primary basis as oil or coal or secondarily in the form of electricity. However, should oil and gas be found off our coast the situation would be transformed overnight.

For many years we have relied for a large proportion of our needs in this regard on the import of oil. Despite the diversification being proposed the Government predict that our dependence on oil will continue to increase up to 1990. Presumably this oil will have to be imported if oil is not found off our coasts. Likewise, the diversification proposed by the Minister, namely, to coal-fired generating stations will require increasing imports of coal. The realistic options at present are whether we continue to rely on foreign oil-wells or coal as against the ordinary utilities of the UK or the EEC. Therefore, I hold the view that the option of inter-connection with the EEC grid warrants further consideration and analysis and should not be rejected without good reasons being advanced to diversify seriously our energy supply sources.

I welcome the Bill. It is in essence to increase the capital allocation limits to the ESB. I wish them well in their outstanding work at international consultancy level. I would also hope that any shackles which the Minister tried to put on the ESB in his speech in relation to domestic consultancy work on the engineering side will be removed and that the ESB get, along with other State-sponsored bodies, full backing to go into the market place, to get work where they can find it, pay a decent wage to the professional staff involved, make a profit for the country and continue to provide a vital service to the people.

Mr. F. O'Brien

I welcome this Bill. It highlights a company who are doing a tremendous job for this country. The ESB since they were founded in 1927 have vindicated the view that State participation can be very successful if operated by efficient people. The ESB have always been able to lay on electricity supply wherever it was needed. The lack of supply was never an impediment for foreign industrialists who wanted to come in here. They always had in effect an entirely efficient service laid on.

The question now of raising additional moneys is to ensure the future well-being of this country regarding supplies of electricity. The history of the ESB has been one of dedication and of ensuring that this country would be progressive. Some of the ESB generating stations are the most efficient in Europe and that speaks volumes for the technical expertise behind them. That is borne out by the fact that the ESB have set up their own international consultancy service. A vote of confidence in the ability of a small and young country in industrial know-how is indicated in that now the ESB are going to advise other countries on how to set up the whole network of electricity. In addition to giving gainful employment to people within the industry here, the ESB are also providing a tremendous fund of technology to countries of the Third World. This type of aid is very important and it is something that we as a nation can be proud of as we are making our presence felt in so many countries with our expertise. This development is good from the point of view of attracting industrialists, who will tend to come in because they will see that we have this expertise. It is important that this be available not for export only but also for here.

The ESB should be able to get into the business of selling their expertise on a competitive basis and the only way that company should operate is on a competitive basis. The ESB should be encouraged to do this because it is important that expertise at all levels be given to industry here as well as abroad. There should be nothing in any legislation which would impede the ESB from competing in any field. There is a great desire now for conservation. Obviously when you are dependent on imported fuel it is important to have a policy of conservation and the ESB have a major role here. A big area which is untapped is that of district heating. The ESB seem rather reluctant to go into the field of district heating, although on the Continent it is very popular and widely used because through it they get maximum value from the fuel they are using. It is time that the ESB examined this. There is district heating for domestic use, and I believe there is also the possibility that a glass-house industry could be built around many of the generating stations, particularly those using turf where there is open space and bogland on which to build such an industry. There is no doubt that the ESB could sell the water on which they have now to spend money for cooling purposes. They could cut the cost that people have to pay for it by at least one-half and in doing this they would still be making a profit. This is the type of conservation we should be talking about. It is terrible to see hot water being pumped away when it could be used and re-circulated for the good of an industry. Studies have been done on this but there is not much point in the studies if you cannot use the steam. In my view this is something viable. It is simple and I believe they should move on it quickly and rapidly.

The area of domestic district heating is again a very feasible project. It operates satisfactorily in other countries and it is reckoned to be roughly 90 per cent efficient. We could heat whole towns by designing a plant to make this kind of operation vaible. Before the oil crisis there was a tremendous boom in oil-fired central heating. Oil has to be imported and we should involve ourselves in district heating in order to conserve energy. Again, coal is an imported fuel. Both oil and coal are expensive fuels. District heating would be a positive approach and the Minister should ask the ESB to consider the feasibility of such a project. There should be no reluctance. Growth areas like Blanchardstown, Tallaght and Clondalkin could be used as pilot schemes and, these being successful, the project would mushroom.

Future energy planning is under fairly severe scrutiny because of the proposed nuclear power station. Many people are not too happy about nuclear generating stations. The Minister says he will not hold a public inquiry. This is foolish. A public inquiry would allay the fears that exist. At such an inquiry the dangers and the safeguards could be spelled out. The Minister should not hesitate. Eventually public pressure may compel him to hold such an inquiry and the establishment of a nuclear power station should depend on the outcome of the inquiry.

This is a completely new development for us and there is a risk. It would be unwise for the Minister to continue his refusal. Admittedly we cannot go on depending on imported fuels because our traditional suppliers might find themselves in a position in which they could no longer supply us. That would be catastrophic. We must examine into other sources of energy. We all hope we will be successful in finding oil off our coast and further gas fields. But we cannot live in hope. There must be wise planning. If people are convinced there is no real danger in a nuclear generating station and that the waste can be disposed of safely then the Government can decide to go ahead. But the people should not be ignored. They should be met and the problems and the advantages should be explained to them. In that way objection can be circumvented.

I appeal to the Minister again to hold an inquiry. This House should be sensitive to public opinion and to people's fears. It is not enough for us to say everything will be all right. A nuclear generating station will obviously cost a vast amount of money. People are concerned and it behoves us and the Government to bring the thing out into the open through the medium of a proper public inquiry. We are not experts in this area. Therefore we would not have the knowledge required to say whether something is safe or whether it would be good for the country in the long term. The time has come to involve the people in this if we are serious about open Government. At the end of the day we would possibly have a nuclear station but we should consider harnessing other types of power such as solar energy and the vast amount of power in the sea, and money should be made available for research into this. Have we fully explored all aspects of turf development, for instance? We should not consider only nuclear power; we should keep our other options open. Even if it is expensive initially the jobs created and the fact that we would use native resources, would offset those costs. We have the expertise within the ESB and outside it to explore these areas and the EEC might give us a grant to develop research programmes. Nuclear power should be a last resort because the servicing of capital to build a nuclear plant would be colossal. experimentation in relation to other fuels and sources of supply should be ongoing.

The ESB are probably the most progressive of all State enterprises. The ESB have decentrailised their activities. There are generating stations in Kerry, Cork, Dublin and Portarlington and there are various peat stations, all of which are giving good employment. When everyone else was a bit slow to consider decentralisation the ESB went ahead with a programme of decentralisation. If the ESB became involved in nuclear power they will have to be very careful in relation to where they establish their plant and will have to have regard to the preservation of the environment. The plant will have to be placed where it can do the least damage.

Turlough Hill in County Wicklow has been a great success in what I would call the storage of electricity. In the off-peak periods they pump up the water and when it is required they filter it back into the grid. When we sell electricity for domestic use we tend to create peaks which are very expensive to maintain because expensive plant must be available. The ESB should consider introducing other programmes like Turlough Hill in an effort to keep costs down, and they should become more involved in commercial activity. As well as being important from a conservation point of view it would have a high labour content. The ESB, because of the type of plant they use, is a capital intensive industry but if they had an offshoot it would become labour intensive and would give a substantial amount of gainful employment. It would also cut out the use of coal fires, thus creating a cleaner atmosphere. It would also reduce our imports and our dependence on foreign fuels. We should encourage the ESB to embark on such an operation.

The ESB are a very progressive concern, not afraid to go into international activity, and for that reason I do not see any reason why they should not be encouraged to engage in new developments at home which would provide much more employment. I welcome this measure. It is a vote of confidence in the country. In my view one way to judge the progress of a nation is by the consumption of electricity and the fact that our consumption of electricity has increased by 10 per cent means that we are progressing industrially. By agreeing to this Bill the ESB can get on with further development to meet the needs of our industries.

Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy (Mr. O'Malley)

I am positively replying this time; I am not making an interim contribution on behalf of Deputy Geoghegan-Quinn or Deputy R. Burke. This is the end. I hope that message goes abroad.

Mr. F. O'Brien

I will convey that message.

Mr. O'Malley

I should like to thank the three Deputies who contributed but, but in some respects I was disappointed that only three spoke. One of the matters I dealt with in my opening speech was the question of financing a new type of power station here, a major imported coal station, at a cost of £350 million. I mentioned some of the problems that exist in regard to this, but coal is not a fashionable topic now. The fashion of the day directs attention elsewhere. While this station which is dealt with in the Bill is a matter of fundamental importance to the country it is a pity that nobody bothered to talk about it here or outside. On the other hand most of the discussion related to a topic which, as I specifically stated at the outset, is not included in the Bill. These are the whims of fashion, and it is not for me to dictate what the fashion should be at any given time. It may be that fashion will change next year or the year after and that something else would be the topic of conversation for discussion then.

I am glad that the House regards the progress of the ESB as good and is, in general terms, in support of their achievements and efforts. With one exception about which there were reservations the House supported the plans and ideas of the ESB for the future. On the question of the first two topics dealt with in the Bill, the question of consultancy, no reservations were expressed about the ESB's activities abroad, but Deputy Kelly raised the question of how much of the ESB's overseas activities might be described as taking the form of overseas development aid and how much of it was purely commercial. I should like to tell the Deputy that it is all purely commercial in the sense that it is all paid for commercially, but about £200,000 worth of the turnover in the last two years could be regarded as overseas development aid. That does not mean, as I understand it, that the ESB did the work for nothing; they were refunded from the World Bank and other such agencies who pay for such overseas activities to less developed countries. I understand that the three countries involved are the Sudan, Tanzania and Lesotho. The total spent by this country in overseas development aid in 1977 was £6.3 million while in 1978 it was £10.6 million, making a total of £16.9 million. The ESB's contribution would, in percentage terms, have been small.

As I have pointed out, the ESB are obliged not to make a loss from these activities abroad and the same obligation applies to their activities at home. Deputy Desmond and Deputy O'Brien wondered why I made it incumbent on the ESB not to interfere in the traditional fields of consultancy here. I did so for the good reason that applies to the ESB and any other semi-State body, that competition by them with existing private firms might be regarded, and frequently is regarded, as unfair. One of the dangers is that a huge semi-State body with enormous resources like the ESB can bury its overheads and it is not truly competing in the sense that a private firm has to meet a great many overheads which are easily absorbed in other areas of the ESB or any other large semi-State body. That is why there is frequently a feeling of unfairness when they enter into such fields. It is in order to avoid that that I have made these stipulations.

I am glad to say that the present position is that the relationship between the ESB and Irish consultants generally is now very good. The fact is that the ESB have provided work for Irish consulting firms, architectural and engineering, as part of their work overseas and it is hoped that the spirit of co-operation will benefit the private and public sectors in securing further work overseas. As I stated I have obliged the ESB to provide separate accounts for this field of activity to prevent, as much as one can, the possibility of some of the overheads being buried in other parts of the boards finances.

Deputy O'Brien referred to the question of district heating and of using some of the waste heat which is inevitably a by-product from many power stations. The position in this regard is that district heating in the sense in which that phrase is understood in countries like Denmark and others where they have brought this concept to a fairly advanced stage is not particularly satisfactory in this country. One of the problems is that the heat becomes available in the form of a low grade heat, generally speaking, at a temperature which is too low to make it very useful in itself at that level. I am advised that it has to be upgraded if it is to be used effectively and that the capital cost involved is very great and in our circumstances in cases which have been studied it has been found not to be commercially justifiable.

There has been a form of district heating in this country, not by the use of waste heat but the provision of heat for an entire block of flats or a series of blocks of flats. There are two such instances to my knowledge, one at Ballymun, Dublin, and the other in a number of blocks of flats built by Galway Corporation in Galway. Both these experiments, if one wishes to call them that, have not been very successful. Both have given rise to a great volume of complaint and both would be unlikely to be repeated in the form originally designed. That is not to say that if proper adaptations are made and better standards of design and control in particular were now applied they might not be at least more successful than at present. It is rather doubtful if these are very economic, because a great deal of heat is wasted unnecessarily which would not be wasted if dwellings were individually heated. It may be possible—I certainly hope it will—for the architectural or engineering profession to achieve a standard of design in this regard suitable for Irish conditions and also economic.

As regards the use of waste heat for greenhouses and horticultural or light industrial purposes there are possibilities. Some months ago I gave the go-ahead to the ESB to build a number of acres of greenhouses at Lanesboro', County Longford, immediately beside the generating station there. I cannot remember the area but the project is for about 10 or 20 acres of greenhouses. They have begun building there now I think and I shall await with interest the outcome of this experiment over the next few years. If it is successful I would envisage, in the first instance a similar operation being carried out in the immediate vicinity of the other turf burning generating stations in the midlands and perhaps some of the other non-turf burning stations might be suitably adapted to something on these lines, although clearly some of them cannot be.

Mr. O'Brien

Will the ESB build these greenhouses themselves and go into the horticultural business? Did the Minister give them any terms of reference on which to operate?

Mr. O'Malley

An Foras Taluntais and the ESB will carry on a joint venture or a public sector venture if you like. The function of the ESB primarily is to supply the heat. An Foras Taluntais will have to make the tomatoes, or whatever else it is, grow. The Moneypoint station was briefly referred to in passing by Deputy Kelly in regard to pollution control. The figure which I mentioned to him of £20 million, an appalling amount of money to have to spend for this purpose, is the projected figure. I understand it will be spent mainly on some apparatus which goes into the stacks to prevent emission of sulphurs and similar potentially harmful emissions from the burning of coal. Planning permission has not yet been granted: it is being applied for within the next week or two. Hopefully, this will be granted early in the new year.

Deputy Desmond spoke about some of the alternative energy sources which we should consider. I should like to say a few words on this subject, although essentially I can only say what I have already said. We should and I think do regard in the long term some of these alternative energy sources as potentially very valuable for us. Probably they will be, but we must also face reality and, whether we like it or wish to accept it or not, we must admit that the view of everybody who has studied these matters including those who were in many cases passionately interested in some of these alternative energy sources is summed up in percentage terms in a document published by the Commission on 21 March 1978, No. 2412, new series, page 11, headed "The Foreseeable Impact of Alternative Energy Sources on Community Energy Policy". The view of the Commission is that by the year 2000, assuming all the experiments that are going on now are successful and that these alternative energy sources can be used to the extent expected and hoped for by then, they will on average supply, on the basis that we have economic growth of 4 per cent per annum in the Community up to then, between 4 per cent and 5 per cent of our energy needs. If we have 3 per cent economic growth, they will on average supply between 3 per cent and 4 per cent of our energy needs in the Community. The percentages will not be significantly different for Ireland. Realistically, I think that the highest percentage of energy obtained from these alternative sources that we could expect by the year 2000 is about five. Much as one would like to promote these things—and certainly it suits us to do so—we would be very unwise to base any future policy or strategy on an assumption that we could expect anything more than a 5 per cent contribution from those sources by that time.

From our point of view one of the potentially most useful of the alternative sources is wave power. In the past two years there has been a considerable amount of research in this area. The EEC are carrying out research off the west coast of Scotland to which we are contributing. We pay a percentage of the cost and get the benefit of the results. The International Energy Agency are carrying out research off the coast of Japan. We are contributing also towards that project and we are getting the benefit of the results. As I see it, there is little point in our starting a third separate programme off the coast of Ireland, particularly as the west coast of Scotland so far as wave conditions are concerned is almost identical with the west coast of Ireland. We have not the resources of the agencies and in my judgment it is better value for us to pay our percentage—normally it is not a big one—and get the benefit of what they are doing rather than try to do it on our own on a small scale and in a haphazard way.

So far as other possibilities of alternative energy are concerned, one that obviously would be of some value to us is biomass in one form or other, but it is not that easy. The ESB are starting experiments under the aegis of the EEC or the International Energy Agency. They will start in the small hand-won turf-burning power station at Cahirciveen, County Kerry. It is calculated that if they could get 30,000 acres of land to produce vegetation for that station, on the basis that they would need 4,000 or 5,000 acres each year and that the turnover would be every five or six years, if they could do all of that, if they could get the stuff to grow and if the conversion process could be brought to the standard of efficiency one would like, then it would be possible in seven or eight years to run the Cahirciveen station at full capacity. When in full production the station would generate five megawatts of electricity, but by that time our installed capacity will probably exceed 4,000 megawatts. Therefore, we are talking in terms of a fraction of 1 per cent.

It is only realistic for us to say here that the prospect of the ESB getting 30,000 acres of land in Kerry at a reasonable price on which to grwo scrub wood or weeds or whatever form the vegetation would take is not great. I am not mentioning these points to throw water on the experiments or on the ideas but to try to bring some sense of reality into the minds of people who tend to be carried away by the possibilities that they think may exist in this area. Even if all matters went well—a fairly large assumption—even if all difficulties with regard to acquisition and experimentation were overcome, the amount of electricity that would be generated would be minimal in the context of national needs.

Another area that has been mentioned and where there are obvious possibilities for us is wind power, but it is not quite so obvious as it might seem at first sight. One of the difficulties is that it can generate electricity only while the wind is blowing and the wind does not blow all that often in this country. It blows at a reasonable rate considerably less than half the time each day. It would not be tenable for the IDA to inform an incoming foreign industrialist that he could be given plenty of power in a certain area but that he would have to close his factory when the wind stops blowing.

At the present stage of development, wind power has a serious environmental drawback, namely, that if it is proposed to build a wind generator or a windmill of sufficient size to give any kind of contribution even on the most local scale it is likely to exceed several hundred feet in height and the noise it will inevitably create when working is such that nobody can live within a reasonable distance. The noise has been described as worse than the noise from a jumbo jet or Concorde taking off. It is a continuous noise.

Of course work is being done on all of these matters and one would hope that in the next five or ten years as experiments continue the position will improve. However, there is not a great degree of realism in thinking that wind power will make a major contribution to the national grid. I could see it making a worthwhile contribution in very localised areas, for example, on an offshore island or where there could be a standby generator, but it would mean that it would be necessary to generate from oil for more than 50 per cent of the time and that would make the operation costly. There is no way the electricity can be stored, except perhaps in batteries, but the amount that can be stored in this way is very small. Undoubtedly wind power could make a contribution to individual houses. One of my colleagues assures me that he heats his house satisfactorily from wind only because where he is situated is not connected to the national grid. Undoubtedly small local contributions of that kind can be made, but we have to concern ourselves with the provision of electricity on a large scale for the industrial, commercial and domestic consumer.

Deputy Kelly spent some time criticising some parts of the Green Paper which I issued last July. In fairness to him, he said he found it generally a useful, helpful and clear document, but he took exception to the chapter on energy conservation which he regarded as less than satisfactory. He also took exception to the rather general terms and the nonspecialist approach of the document. I should like to refer the Deputy to Chapter 1, section 1, paragraph 1 and line 1 which stated:

The primary purpose of this discussion document is to give general information on current energy problems in Ireland.

That is what the Green Paper does. It is not purporting to be a specialist document. When we decided to produce the document in January or February this year one of the first things I did in relation to it was to make the decision whether we were going to go for a specialised document, full of the most detailed information, projections, calculations and everything else or a relatively brief, general document that could be useful to laymen who were not engineers or not deeply involved in the whole power energy question. I took the decision, and so instructed my Department, that we were to go for a relatively simple document comprehensible to the average person in this country. I think we achieved that.

Mr. F. O'Brien

That was very sound.

Mr. O'Malley

I could have taken the opposite decision and produced some learned document that perhaps not 50 people in the entire country would have read. It is possible—if there was sufficient time available to the officials of the Department—that we could produce a document of the kind Deputy Kelly suggested might be helpful. I have no doubt it would be helpful to some experts. We could perhaps give it a limited circulation to the 30, 40 or 50 people in the country who would be interested, but I would not see much point in producing it as a Government document for public consumption because it would be of no interest to the great majority of people. It is fair to say that this document has achieved much of what it set out to do. It has explained certain basic considerations in regard to our energy problems in fairly clear language. It has set out, in as fair a way as it can, in as open a way as it can, the various possible alternatives open to us. It has also set out the fact that there are certain alternatives not open to us—although they may well be popularly believed to be so—and the document would be failing in its duty if it did not demonstrate through the facts that certain alternatives are not open to us, much as some of us might wish they were.

Deputy Kelly went on to deal with the conservation chapter. I agree that it is not one of the more stimulating parts of the paper. But of necessity, at the time it was written, it could not appear as advanced perhaps as we would wish to have it. One of the areas in which there is the greatest scope for conservation is in the general housing and construction area, as I think was mentioned by Deputies O'Brien, Desmond and Kelly. For that reason I have had fairly lengthy discussions and correspondence with the Minister for the Environment who is more or less solely in charge of that area so far as the Government are concerned. I think it is fair to say I have made a fair deal of progress; I have not yet made as much progress as I would wish to; hopefully I can make more in the months ahead. The Minister for the Environment will be announcing shortly various measures in relation to housing which will be made compulsory in aid of an energy conservation programme. As he has said to me, it does not at this stage go as far as he would wish. We will continue to work on it and hope to develop it further over the next year or two.

One example of the kind of things involved—and I am not going to go into detail about them, give a comprehensive list or anything else because that will be a matter for the Minister for the Environment to do, as I understand he will be doing shortly—is that I put it to him that if anybody is installing a fireplace in a house, either new or old, in this country at present, is it not the height of lunacy not to put in a back boiler? Could we not achieve the situation in which it would be illegal, in the sense that one would not get a grant, if one did not put in a back boiler? I am glad to say he has accepted the validity of that argument. There is a tremendous amount of electricity and energy in various forms wasted in this country heating water in houses where there is often constantly a fire lighting, where the heat of that fire—which is heating one room only—could be heating the water that the people concerned are spending £1, £2, £3 or £4 a week heating separately in an electrically-operated cylinder or whatever. There are quite a number of possibilities of that kind. I mentioned the back boiler in a fireplace simply as an example of one way we could achieve energy conservation. Unfortunately one cannot achieve it as rapidly as one would wish because building standards are not things that can be changed overnight; it has to be done over a period of time and in disappointingly gradual steps from my point of view.

I have covered most of the matters raised in this debate other than the one spoken about at most length by the three contributors, that is, the question of the possibility of the ESB building a nuclear power station in this country. Although I specifically stated in my opening speech that the moneys being allowed for under this Bill did not cover that project but covered Moneypoint and a number of smaller ones like the turf stations at Lanesborough, Shannonbridge, Aghada and Poolbeg, it would be necessary to promote further legislation of this kind in a few years time assuming that it was decided to go ahead with the proposal of the ESB as approved by the Government on 28 November 1973. Notwithstanding that, I suppose because of the sort of interest or emotion it seems to engender, a great deal of the discussion of the three Deputies was related to this nuclear proposal.

Mr. F. O'Brien

It is a fear in people's minds we must try to allay.

Mr. O'Malley

We had a very useful discussion. I listened very carefully to what Deputy Kelly had to say. While he has a habit of racing away into clouds of unreason at times, he was more objective and basic today and, I felt, had his feet on the ground to an extent that is almost unusual for him. Deputy O'Brien had some reasonable things to say also. Deputy Kelly probably had no real alternative but to do so, but he made it clear that he personally had no objection to nuclear power. He sees the advantages and probably, in the Irish context— although he did not say so in so many words—feels that it probably is the right or wise thing for us to do and have it available in ten or 11 years time, or whatever. However, he urges on me the advisability of having what he calls, and what people in the newspapers call, a public inquiry. He was good enough to go on to define the position, that there is no provision in Irish law for any such inquiry to take place—there is no precedent for it; he does not know who is going to do it, who could do it, or when, where or how they could do it. Nonetheless he feels we should have some kind of inquiry. He went on to say that he understood why I cannot view the proposal with any enthusiasm. Indeed he articulated, from my point of view extremely well and fairly the kinds of reservations that I, or any Minister, would have when faced with a demand for something rather nebulous that you know is not going to achieve anything. While accepting my point of view Deputy Kelly still said that he thought we should have one—I will paraphrase him, I hope not unfairly—that it would allow people to let off steam, that if an inquiry was held, irrespective of its result, agitation or fear on the part of a lot of people concerned would die down. Deputy Kelly very readily admitted and accepted—as I recognise—the fact that, of course, a lot of the people involved in this, no matter what results were achieved or what facts were proved, would never be satisfied anyway. He said I had to live with that. I recognise that I will have to live with it because they are never going to be satisfied.

Mr. F. O'Brien

With regard to the oil refinery at Dublin Bay, while it might not necessarily have been an inquiry as such, there was, on the planning applications, a full and comprehensive report.

Mr. O'Malley

There will be, as the Deputy is aware, a full and comprehensive investigation of the planning application by Wexford County Council. My experience of Wexford County Council, both elected members and officials, is that they are no less competent or able than their counterparts in Dublin Corporation. I have every confidence that they can conduct an adequate investigation. The comparison the Deputy draws, if it is valid, can be covered perfectly adequately by the possibility here. If anybody objects to whatever decision the Wexford County Council comes to they can now, unlike in the case of the Dublin Bay oil definery project, apply to a planning board, who are independent of the Government and the Minister of the day. That was not open at the time of the Dublin Bay oil refinery proposal.

I was going through, in a general way, what Deputy Kelly had been saying and I was saying that I appreciate, and that he seems to appreciate, some of my difficulties. He recognised them. While he agreed that nothing in the real sense could be achieved by an inquiry he suggested that, as a public relations exercise or as a means of getting people to let off steam, some form of inquiry might be generated. That would be an easy way out for me if we could have some such thing. I do not know who is supposed to hold it. Normally inquiries are held by High Court judges. I do not know whether any member of the High Court or of the Supreme Court feels himself any more competent than anyone else to inquire into a matter such as this. There are two possible aspects of what might be inquired into. One is the whole question of safety of the operation of such a station. But everybody seems to forget that in 1971 this House passed the Nuclear Energy Act which set up a board to look at and cover exactly those points and to advise the Minister of the day on all these aspects. In particular the Nuclear Energy Board has a duty to licence each and every individual step in the process of applying for and building a nuclear project whether it is a generating station or anything else; for example, it could be one of the machines in St. Luke's Hospital which use radioactive material and the Nuclear Energy Board would also be responsible in the last resort for its safety and for licencing and installations and so on. They are forgotten about. I do not want to write them off; they are competent people and they should not be disregarded or ignored or written off as of no consequence.

There is the other point in relation to an inquiry. It is a relatively modest, small conventional station which we propose to build here. There are over 300 of them in commercial operation in the world and another 200 or so under construction. Is the one we propose in any way different from these hundreds of others? Will any new information or knowledge be gleaned by a technical inquiry into the operating aspects of a conventional station like that? I do not think so. On the other hand a lot of people might think there would be something to be gained by it and Deputy Kelly suggests that even if there is no knowledge gained we should go through the motions of having the inquiry anyway. There may well be merit in that approach although it is not very constructive and it will probably cost a lot of money and will cause all sorts of repercussions.

As I see it this demand for an inquiry seems to have arisen only in the last 12 months at about the same time as the Windscale Inquiry began in Britain. Up to that time there was no question of it; people did not know what an inquiry was and there was no question of it. Suddenly Windscale started and it went on for three or four months. It cost hundreds of thousands of pounds if not millions of pounds and it finally ended up with the judge and his advisers or assessors who conducted the inquiry telling the British Government that it was perfectly safe to go ahead with Windscale. Within five minutes of the findings being given the people who had asked for the inquiry in the first place said that the results of it should be disregarded, and that it was all rubbish. As Deputy Kelly rightly says we would be faced here with the same situation. One wonders whether one should commit a great deal of public money and a great deal of time to something that is really not going to achieve anything in the long run and which is not going to give us any technical information or safety control knowledge which we do not already have or cannot acquire very easily from abroad.

I have made it clear in this House and in public on several occasions that I have no objection in principle to an inquiry into this or into any other matter provided it can serve some useful purpose. I have invited those who seek it to tell me what useful purpose it can achieve in the sense of what knowledge can it give us that we do not have at our disposal. The first answer I have got to that question that I have been asking for, perhaps, six months was from Deputy Kelly today. I hope I do not paraphrase him unfairly or inaccurately, but in effect what he told me was that I would get no information from an inquiry; I would learn nothing new; it would achieve nothing new and I was perfectly right in saying that the people involved are not reasonable anyway. Some of them are reasonable, of course, but I agree with Deputy Kelly that many of them are not. They just have a fixation about this thing, a whim of fashion at the moment, which will move on to some other area in a year or two. Deputy Kelly said that I would gain nothing in the sense of any knowledge or any new information that I do not have already to make the thing work better or operate more safely or anything else, but at the same time I would allay public fear or anxiety in some way by allowing people to go in and give evidence and, as it were, get it off their chest. There may well be some merit in that. That is the first answer that I have got to this question which I have been posing for six months. It is not a very satisfactory and compelling answer but it is something to go on and it is something that I will think about. It is worth thinking about. Often there have been situations in life, not least in political life, where it can be worthwhile going through the motions of some operation although one knows that it is not going to achieve very much.

The other aspect of things that might be inquired into by such an inquiry, if one could envisage how to set it up and with whom, would be the question of the general economics of the whole matter and the cost of it. I can only say to Deputy Kelly or to anybody else who makes suggestions on these lines that neither this Government nor any other Government, whatever party or parties it may be formed by, could contemplate a situation where major economic decisions for this country were, in effect, going to be made by a High Court judge or by a High Court judge and a technical assessor or an engineer or somebody like that. The making of major economic decisions for the future of this country is a matter for the Government, and if the Government of the day fail to make them they are failing in their duty and should be kicked out.

Here we have it being suggested that this matter should be the subject of a long public inquiry and that the whole cost aspect of it, the economics of it and the projected demand and all the rest of it should be inquired into by some public inquiry which, in practice here, means a High Court judge. At the very moment that this request is being made a decision of the most enormous consequences for this country, literally 100 times more important than the matter we are discussing here today, is going to have to be made over the next month or so in relation to the European Monetary System and there is no question of inquiries there or anything else. I do not exaggerate when I say from the long-term point of view of the country that it is 100 times more important than the matter we are discussing today. The matter we are discussing today has roughly the same cost and the same output of electricity as the coal generating station at Moneypoint, County Clare, which I referred to earlier. That is not the subject of any comment at all other than a passing inquiry as to what the cost of the pollution control mechanisms in it would be.

I have talked in some detail on my feelings in regard to this question. I hope I have responded as openly, objectively and fairly as I can to what I feel were reasonably argued and reasonably sound arguments which were put to me. I feel for the first time ever that some form of answer was given today to the question which I have been continually posing over the last six months, that is what would such an inquiry achieve? I was told that it will not achieve anything as far as knowledge and safety are concerned but it will achieve some lessening of public anxiety which some people here and particularly abroad are trying to generate among ordinary people.

I accept, as Deputy Kelly said, that at least half, and perhaps more of the people who are voicing reservations at the moment are genuinely doing so. I am equally adamant that a fair proportion of them are not genuine at all and are not prepared to accept any reasoning or objectivity in regard to this matter. However, for the reason that it was put forward today by Deputy Kelly I am prepared to consider if we could manufacture some means for having some type of inquiry. As the Deputy said there is no precedent for it and there seem to be no provisions in law under which such an inquiry could be held. Deputy O'Brien made an interesting point that the public anxiety aspect of the Dublin Bay oil refinery proposal was got over because there was a pretty full investigation at the planning level and that there was a public hearing by the planning authority. There is nothing to stop Wexford County Council following the same procedure if they want to.

Mr. F. O'Brien

Or An Bord Pleanála.

Mr. O'Malley

Both of them could do it. I suggested that at an earlier stage, but I was told by some people that even though there could be full public inquiries at local level and Bord Pleanála level a third and separate inquiry would be needed. I could not see what the third one would do that the other two could not other than go into the economics of it, which would not be relevant to a planning application although all the other aspects of it would.

Mr. F. O'Brien

The safety aspects are very worrying and An Bord Pleanála could look at them.

Mr. O'Malley

It is not for me to lay down the law to them about how they should conduct their affairs. I simply say, in the light of what Deputy O'Brien says, that they may well consider having inquiries in relation to those applications heard in public. It is entirely a matter for them, but in the light of what Deputy O'Brien says it might be very useful and very helpful. It might alleviate some of the anxieties which exist at the moment. If some form of public inquiry, whether at the planning level, the Bord Pleanála level or any other level which it were possible to create were held we would have trooping over here to give evidence on their solemn oath all the professional evidence givers in relation to nuclear energy who turn up at every inquiry, objection and everything else all over the world and who are guaranteed to come out pat with all the usual stuff they have come out with in every other country and have been overruled. They will all be back over here. They will be well paid and put up in some good hotel.

Mr. F. O'Brien

That is what democracy is about.

Mr. O'Malley

Yes, but it is a pity that we have the same people. It would not be so bad if we had different faces. They have appeared all over Britain, Europe and America. They will appear here too and they will be welcome. I believe I have covered that matter as fully as I can and explained my views on it. I believe I have responded to the views expressed in the debate as fairly and as fully as I can. I appreciate the views expressed, particularly the fairly objective attitude taken up by Deputy Kelly. I have covered, together with the nuclear matters, all the other matters which were mentioned, to the best of my ability. I would like to thank the House for what appears to be their acceptance of the Bill.

Question put and agreed to.

Agreed to take remaining Stages today.

Bill put through Committee, reported without amendment and passed.

Dáil Éireann debate - Thursday, 23 Nov 1978

Electricity (Supply) (Amendment) Bill, 1978: Second and Subsequent Stages.

Mr. O'Brien

Dáil Éireann debate -
Thursday, 23 Nov 1978