 Thank you very much. And I would like to join in on behalf of the IIEA, welcome you all here to this jointly hosted biennial conference, jointly hosted by ourselves and by the ESB. I want to thank Evine Houlouin for moderating, agreeing to moderate this conference today. And for her introduction, I know there's going to be a terrific event and so much going on in the room and around the room to interest us in the course of the day. I want to thank in particular all of the speakers in advance on behalf of the IEA. If I may particularly single out part of the ESB for their continuing support for the work of the IIEA. Given all of the commitments the ESB has, all of the work it's doing, all of the development, that's an organisation that still takes time to invest interest and resources in thinking about this issue, in debating this issue, in the research, and all of the work that needs to be done in order for us to ensure that we are on the right path to achieving the aims that we have in this whole climate change agenda. As I say, the IEA is delighted to be hosting this conference in this historic splendid and historic scene setting here in the roundroom in the mansion house. Some of you will be aware that I was Minister for Energy in the last government. And just reflecting on this conference, coming up to this conference in recent days, I think thinking back three years, three and a half years, in one sense it seems so recent, in another sense it seems so long ago, since we were preparing a white paper, not on the broader agenda completely of climate change, but on energy policy. And so much of what we were thinking about then and talking about then including in this room is reflected, I'm really pleased to see, in the climate action plan that's published by the government this year. And when you read that plan you see many of the issues, the occupation, many of the concerns, plans, constraints, opportunities that we were, I was going to say wrestling with, but we were identifying three, four years ago, now appearing in that document. But with a much higher level I think of urgency, a sense of commitment, a sense of broader buy-in right across government and right across all of the agencies that need to be involved in this enormous task. So I think that the climate plan represents, constitutes a real advance for us. You can have your criticisms about its drawbacks. You can say that there's things in there that need to be developed more. You can say there's stuff that should be there that's not there. You can have your reviews about it, but certainly it represents a very important benchmark for where we are now and where the country needs to go in the coming period. And I think that's happened for a number of reasons. I think as I say there's a step change in public engagement and in the public discourse, even in the last three years. And you can analyse, you can say that's happened for quite a number of different reasons. When we were doing our work in 2015, we were still coming out of a period, although I suppose when you look back now on the decade of the crashes sometimes described, in fact things had been moving more quickly in the real economy than maybe we appreciated at the time, so we probably could have been more ambitious than we ended up being. But we were still facing the aftermath of a period of retrenchment, economic retrenchment, a lot of depression, economic and indeed personal and political across the country. So that was the background to our thinking, unfortunately, in 2015 and in 2016. And that has changed for all of the reasons that we're aware of in terms of economic change in the country, but also in the quality of the discussion and the involvement in the engagement of the public. But there's no initiative that contributed more to that than the Citizens' Assembly, because I think the Citizens' Assembly really drove this discussion to a new level and to a new height, leading then obviously on to the Erachtes Committee and the work that they were able to do. But I think the Citizens' Assembly invested this whole agenda with a democratic legitimacy that was not previously there or not certainly there to the extent that it now is. And I think that when we reflect on the nature and the extent and the magnitude of the adjustments that we need to make in our economies and in our societies right across the world, manifestly there needs to be that high level of democratic legitimacy, democratic input, democratic and citizen involvement. And I think that's really to be welcomed, that that is the new context in which we now find ourselves in this country and indeed internationally as we see today in New York. I think that's crucial. I don't think it's just crucial because of the fact because of all the myriads of actions that we need to take as individual citizens and that's self-evident. That's important that giving an example, people leading in their communities, leading as citizens, that's certainly true. But I think that it's true and the necessity for public engagement is there on another level as well and that is because the really big steps, if you look at the Climate Action Plan and look at the targets that we have to keep to, all governments have to achieve, when you look at them, look at the magnitude of the challenges and the requirements that are there, it will need to be underpinned by a significantly higher level of knowledge and of engagement of the part of citizens and indeed voters. And I emphasize voters because we have a new politicization of this issue now as we've seen in the recent elections and we've seen other elections around Europe and indeed across the world. And it is more political now. It certainly is politicized. It's right there at the heart of what hopes and one believes that it will need to be at the very heart of political debate and discourse into the future. So that it will be no good for governments to publish plans just to indicate that certain taxes will be increased or need to be increased and then simply to justify these proposals to parliament in the usual way as you might introduce a budget, a minister deal with that or government deal with that to base it in public with the opposition, go on the television, justify it to parliament and get the votes through. Like those kind of conventional ways of delivering public support for measures that a government wants to do are not going to be sufficient in the future. So this deeper level of engagement and quality engagement is going to be critical. So that's not enough and there's a room where there are a lot of familiar faces that are economists in the room, engineers, investors, people with a stake, people with a commitment to this agenda, but we're not going to be enough. That's not just going to do anymore. It's simply not going to be necessary but not sufficient. So when we did the white paper back in 2016, we laid very of 15, we laid very heavy emphasis on this concept of citizen engagement and citizen involvement, community involvement and that is all the more critical now when we see issues, just a brief word of parity earlier, we see the way the kind of changes that are going to be necessary in the short and the medium term in terms of people's livelihoods, people's jobs where there will be necessary change. That has to be managed. We talk about a just transition but it's a transition that has to be managed. We've had a higher appreciation of the concept of the prosumer so that we're not just passive recipients or users of, for example electricity or energy that we also want to be active consumers as well. And last but certainly by no means least, the marvellous context in which we're meeting today, the Friday is for a future, marches and demonstrations, the engagement of young people, it's just completely changed the tone and the content in every way of the debate and of the work that we're doing. So I think it's in many ways this conference is critically important because it is about how we manage that debate and how we draw a bridge between the energy the commitment, the excitement on the street and the critical actions that need to be taken. And there's always the cry for urgency and that's a cry and a demand that we all share. Urgency urgent action urgent change we know that so many of the things that we need to do can't in fact be done urgently. We want to have an urgent level of commitment to doing them, but so much of it just manifestly in terms of the sort of a shift that you need in the economy a sort of shift that you need in energy policy, it's not something that even if you had everybody on site that you could do as quickly as any of us as we would like to do. So it's about affecting this necessary transition, finding language to say to people, yes the urgency is appropriate, yes the urgency in your language and in your discourse is right, but let's all be together in delivering this so that we don't foster or run the risk of fostering dashed expectations. I think one of the risks always is that there's a high level of expectation of very quick response and action and delivery and the engineering and the science that tells us that while yes it has to be done, we know that it will take some time to do it. So do we have the language in our public discourse, politicians policy opinion makers people in this room, do we have the language to join up the energy and the excitement with the critical actions that need to be taken. I think that's one of the great contributions a conference like this can make if you look at the lineup, all of the different sectors of our society and our economy that need action and discuss them here from a terrific lineup of speakers and understand that this new level of quote-unquote ownership that the public now has and is demanding must be matched by real action with the timelines and all of the mechanisms that are in the climate plan in order to achieve them. And I just finish with this and I'm not an active politician but I think I can still talk about politics and politicians and I think that there is a level of responsibility that politicians now have which goes beyond simply you know the box ticking of yes this is an important issue and yes we make a speech acknowledging it and welcoming what all the young people are doing. I think that politicians have an enormous responsibility to demonstrate and to explain and to debate the real what kind of actions need to be taken, what the reality will be for people in their lives of taking those actions. And that's not a very attractive thing for a politician to be doing. Particularly and I accept there's a huge opportunity here we're not just talking about changes being imposed and you know that it's all a negative we know that there are huge numbers of opportunities for business and for citizens here but there will be change that will involve some measure of loss and some measure of pain and we don't like to use that word in the language of this debate now but we have to face the fact that there will be a cost in different sectors and it's about not pretending that it won't be there it's about giving leadership as to what that will be to show that we can replace jobs with new jobs for example to show that people can actually consume energy in a different way to show people the positive course but not to take a kind of a polyana sense that there's not going to be any cost and I don't think politicians are serving the public and serving this debate that is the attitude that they might be tempted to take particularly if there's an election coming along and really there's also an election coming along so that's just the point I think about politicians so finally thank you again for your attendance as chair of the energy group and the IEM delighted to we're delighted as an organization to be associated with the ESB in hosting this conference I thank all of the speakers and in particular I thank you for your attendance I look forward to deliberations thank you very much