Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It is good news that the Government is not opposing this Bill, and I commend Sinn Féin on its introduction. For the most part it is a tribute to the people in the midlands - in Laois, Offaly, Westmeath and elsewhere - who have campaigned and forced this issue onto the agenda. Neither they nor I are opposed to the development of renewable energy resources, but major questions arise in the development of those resources about the impact on local communities, about proper public consultation with those communities, about health and safety issues and about the efficiency and viability of this industrialised, corporatist approach to developing renewable energy resources. The bottom line is that the Government has not done its homework in these areas in order to establish the case for these things, to set out a regime which ensures proper environmental protection, proper consideration of local communities and indeed, the business case for the real environmental efficiency of these huge turbines. I learned the simple fact today that a wind turbine requires 200 tonnes of concrete to construct it and every tonne of concrete results in one tonne of carbon dioxide. Given the relatively short life span of wind turbines, even there one can see there will be serious problems, not to mention construction and transport costs and the infrequency of wind. These are major issues that need to be considered.

This is true not just in the midlands but also for the Dublin Array project - that is, the plan to put one of the biggest wind farms in the world a very short distance off the coast in Dublin Bay in a way that could be seriously detrimental to that bay as an amenity. It could well be a case of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, because the damage to a tourism amenity and a piece of heritage could far outweigh any supposed or spurious economic advantage. I am ringing alarm bells about the corporatist and industrialised approach to developing renewable energy resources. That is not the way to go.

One of the players in this is Element Power, previously owned by the person who owned SWS Energy, who got the interconnector rights for wind energy into the national grid from, as I understand it, Noel Dempsey. He got them for a song - a few million - but recently sold them to Bord Gáis for half a billion euro. The company happens to be owned by someone who was a former Fine Gael candidate or somebody very close to Fine Gael. This is the sort of information that needs to be examined. Was a tender in place for those interconnector rights? Was there an open competition? Is this another case similar to that of Eircom, in which people are plundering natural resources for their own profit and not for the benefit of our economy, our society or our environment?

See this speech in context