Oireachtas committee will keep pressure on ESB to deliver on 'highly ambitious' targets

Vivienne Clarke

The chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Infrastructure and National Development Plan Delivery, Sean Fleming, has said that the committee will “keep the heat to their feet” of the ESB to ensure they meet “highly ambitious” targets to significantly increase domestic electricity connections over the next few years, effectively doubling what they achieved in the previous five years.

"The targets are fine, but delivery and achieving the targets is the work these state bodies have to do. And that's why we've been onto them."

Mr Fleming told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland that the Oireachtas committee had been established to oversee the implementation of the National Development Plan.

“We had the ESB in recently asking about their targets and they came back to it with further information last week pointing out that they want to effectively do everything they did in the last five years in terms of domestic connection and double that so that's a highly ambitious target in anybody's book and now we're going to do a deep dive into are we sure they can actually deliver it?

“They're telling us their targets, the targets are wonderful, but delivery and achieving the targets is the work these state bodies have to do. And that's why we've been onto them.

"We got good information from them so far, but now we're going to have to go back to the ESB. Do they have the staffing, do they have to train staff to do this, do they have their financial resources to do this and we all want them to succeed. We've got the targets but I have no idea yet how they're going to achieve it and let's hope they can, but we want to keep the heat to their feet and that's one of the roles of our committee to make sure they can deliver.”

Mr Fleming said that the ESB’s target was “a really big ask”.