Thomas Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will not repeat all of what Deputy McEntee said, but I agree with her that the Government will be grossly irresponsible if does not publish guidelines by the end of the year. The Minister is being blamed locally by his Government colleagues for the failure to publish guidelines, but he is correct that Deputy Alan Kelly is the Minister responsible. The Minister, Deputy White, seems to be the bogeyman in Meath at present with regard to wind turbines. This is probably unfair because the ball is in the court of the Minister, Deputy Kelly and, as the Minister said, it is a matter for the entire Government, both Fine Gael and the Labour Party, to make the ultimate decision.

The slowness in dealing with this is contrasted severely with the alacrity with which the Minister has changed the terms of the REFIT 2 scheme over the past week. He has facilitated wind energy companies, which have lobbied him to make a change to the scheme to facilitate projects which have made planning applications, such as those in Emlagh and Maighne, but have not yet received a grant of planning permission. The Minister has changed the terms of the scheme to facilitate these projects and allow them to qualify for the REFIT 2 scheme if they obtain planning permission by the end of next year as opposed to by the end of this year. The Department's website mentions queries from, but I call it lobbying by, energy companies which have made planning applications but which did not have their ducks in a row and were not going to comply with the terms and conditions of the scheme. The scheme would be of huge financial benefit to them and would probably make the schemes valuable. These companies do not yet have planning permission and it is certainly unlikely that the project in Maighne will have planning permission by the end of the year, and for that in Emlagh it will be 21 December at the earliest. Why was this done so quickly? Why were they facilitated?

Throughout this debate there seems to have been a facilitation of these developments, first, by not publishing guidelines and, now, by changing the terms and conditions of the REFIT 2 scheme which were approved not just by the Government but also by the European Commission under state aid rules. Has the Minister presented the changes to the Commission and, if so, is it happy with what he is proposing? Will he outline the extent of what the Department calls "queries" received, or what I would call "lobbying", in recent weeks?