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

I have a point that is specifically on the amendments. The whole point of a development plan is that it is democratically decided, so contravening it is a serious matter. I would be interested to hear Deputy Matthews come back on this. The amendments suggest this should be overridden because we have climate objectives, or that this might be allowed. On the one hand, it is imperative, but the Deputy knows that a lot of the potential areas of conflict are going to be around conflicts between biodiversity or marine life and the wishes of industrial developers of wind turbines. In actuality, that is where a lot of the conflict is going to emerge, I would have thought. I am worried that if we say we can contravene the democratically decided development plan because developers say their development is consistent with the Government's imperative to meet climate targets, although the developers can reference our climate objectives, for them, there is an imperative just to get the development done because they have a lot of money invested in it. I would be concerned about that because the biodiversity crisis is every bit as important, from the point of view of protecting the sustainability of existence on this planet, as developing wind energy.