Mr. Graham Doyle:

I thank the Deputy. The Derrybrien wind farm case refers to Ireland’s non-compliance with a judgment in a European Court of Justice case from July 2008. It is specifically about non-compliance with the development consent for a wind farm in Derrybrien, County Galway, and the environmental impact assessment directive. The wind farm is owned and operated by a subsidiary of the ESB. The Comptroller and Auditor General has set out that on foot of a finding against Ireland on this — it was a judgment in late 2019 — fines of about €13 million, imposed by the Commission, have been paid by the State to date. It was always the case that the judgment would be complied with once the wind farm was subjected to a retrospective environmental impact assessment, known as substitute consent. That is a statutory process, essentially. It required the ESB, as the owner and operator of the wind farm, to submit an application to An Bord Pleanála. That was done in August 2020 and An Bord Pleanála very recently, in the past week or two, issued a finding against the application in that case. We will now seek to engage with the European Commission to close out the infringement case.