Mr. Dave Walsh:

I will kick off. Obviously, the Planning Act and the Schedule to the Act set the threshold. I think it is 25 turbines or a wind energy level of 50 MW. If something meets the threshold, it will come into the board directly. Regardless of whether it involves large-scale or smaller-scale developments, the board must have regard to a range of factors. They include national policy, planning guidelines, regional and spatial plans, city and county plans and local area plans. We must look at the whole range of issues. Regardless of whether it involves Government guidance or a county development plan, there are objectives that, depending on how one reads them, can conflict. There could be objectives around encouraging greater renewable energy generation, protecting landscapes, providing more industry and encouraging rural activity. The board has a range of highly skilled and highly professional planners, who must take everything from the national to the regional to the local into account and must make a judgment call. Planning is never an exact science. It is not a blanket model that one can move because every consideration and every case has its own nuances around access, visibility, appropriateness of location, stability and even the appropriateness of whether one would get the right wind conditions to make it viable. A challenge not only for the board but for planning authorities in dealing with smaller-scale projects is to weigh up all of these different factors and to find the best planning solution. It is often on the basis of the information we have before us and the views of people in favour of or against it but it also takes from the city and county plans, as well as national guidance.