Mr. Niall Cussen:

I am delighted to hear the Deputy found the councillor training beneficial. She will remember that when we were established in 2019, the local elections had only just happened. Even though we were barely functional back then, we decided to pour a lot of resources into supporting elected members. We continue that process through engagement through the Association of Irish Local Government. We have a whole new training programme coming in the context of the Planning and Development Act. We have two in-person events on that in October.

A lot of the Deputy’s focus was on renewables. Our role is about ensuring that Government policy, as it is, is broadly reflected in the relevant development plans. We are not the policy body. That is the jurisdiction of the Minister and so on. We currently do not have guidelines around solar development and solar energy projects. There is a wider raft of energy policies, on which I will ask Mr. Mullan to come in, and how the decision-making process goes on anyway despite the fact that there are not solar guidelines. There is no doubt about it. Planning guidance on renewables generally, and solar specifically, will more than likely come along in due course and will be helpful. That does not mean we are sitting on our hands in the meantime. There is a whole piece on the translation of the national renewable energy targets that fall out of the climate plan energy policy into the spatial plans of the local authorities. The revised national planning framework had targets for the three regional assembly areas across a mix of renewable technologies such as wind, solar, biomass and so on. As part of the implementation of the national planning framework, the updated regional spatial economic strategies will take that out in more detail and work through the local authority renewable strategy methodology to break our more detail for the individual local authority. There is a process coming on giving more guidance to local authorities on what they need to go after in the context of renewables. We need to decarbonise our electricity systems and our economy, etc.

I turn to the practical and training piece about guidance and supporting staff and elected members. Working closely with the local government, we have thankfully seen the establishment of the planning service training group, which is a shared service across the 31 local authorities to provide detailed technical training for local authority staff. It is run out of the local authority services national training group based in Tipperary. We are working with it to put in place a whole series of events on renewables, climate, infrastructure and all of those technical aspects of solar and getting the right balance.

I am familiar with south-east Meath and so on. As I travel around it on the highways and the byways, I can literally see the approaching scale of development. That is out of our remit directly, however. The land use review is looking at the competing demands for rural land, be it for agriculture, forestry, renewables and so on, and how that is mediated, etc. While this matter definitely goes out of the competency of the Office of the Planning Regulator, it would be worth the committee's time to look at the progress of that area. To use the old phrase, there is a lot going on but there is more to do in the context of that renewables piece. There is no escaping addressing our climate emergency, either.