Mr. John Reilly:

There is no question that what is being proposed is of a significant scale. We have never hidden from that fact, not from the word go. However, what we should consider, particularly in Bord na Móna's case, is the form and nature of the land that we have in this part of the midlands. For example, the Mountlucas site, on which we are siting 28 turbines, is 1,100 ha in size. That is one of the smallest individual cutaway bogs that we have in the midlands. It is the form and nature of the landscape in the midlands which, we believe, allows us to consider something of this scale without intruding to the point at which it becomes a major problem for communities. Obviously, on the periphery of our cutaways we begin to move into areas where there are communities and one-off houses. However, there are considerable tracts of landscape in the midlands of such a size where there is no population at all.