Sorca Clarke (Longford-Westmeath, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

When the Minister talks about climate action and climate change, there is one core issue missing and that is climate justice. I speak in particular today about my constituents around Rochfortbridge, who are facing a bleak winter, and that was before the announcements earlier this week. They are worried about transport costs. The Minister speaks about transport but bus services are being cut. Our bus schedule that makes no sense. I am talking about the equivalent of a waterproof tea bag in that it makes no sense whatsoever.

The Minister also mentioned Bord na Móna. Let us talk about that for a moment, in particular the so-called energy park to be developed on 7,400 acres of a land bank in counties Offaly, Meath and Westmeath to co-locate 200 MW of electricity generated by wind, solar and green hydrogen production. Bord na Móna expects to lodge planning within the next 18 to 24 months and will begin consultation with local communities. Bord na Móna also expects this energy park to be attractive for industrial and high-demand energy users, large-scale distribution facilities and data centres. We then couple that with the Castlelost FlexGen plant, the battery facility that will store energy from the grid at times of high wind generation and release it during periods of high demand or periods of low renewable energy generation. There will also be a natural gas generator for times of extreme pressure on supply and it will draw gas from a natural gas pipeline a few kilometres up the road from the 50-acre site.

What my constituents in that area think when they read reports like that is that their homes, communities and energy needs are secondary to the energy needs of large industry and data centres, but that they will have to continue to make cutbacks. It strikes them very hard when the Government cannot even get the spin right about whether we are going to have blackouts this winter. I remind the Minister that few communities in the midlands who believe a word that Bord na Móna says when it comes to community consultation because of the belief that that is exactly what they are - words - and the decision has already been made at corporate level. What do cases like this say to the groups in north-west Meath about their judicial review concerning wind farms?

When the Government introduced the policy in 2018 to encourage data centres, and it was a policy with no plan, constituencies such as mine were going to bear the brunt. That is totally unfair. We have a climate suitable to data centres but so does half of northern Europe. The reason they are here is tax breaks, something we have seen today because of Perrigo. To conclude, this is the same constituency where, 30 km down the road, there is a stack of Latvian peat being stored at the edge of a bog.

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