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

The Minister of State and his officials will be familiar with the Marine Institute’s Real Map of Ireland, but I do not know whether the public is that familiar with it. It begs the point. While I realise the Minister of State said that, in the context of the NMPF, there was public consultation, this was all new to those at the public meeting held in my area, the Save Our Seafront meeting. There are still many people who have not been reached regarding significant changes, plans and objectives for the development of the marine area and how these may affect them. We still have a way to go in terms of the level of engagement with the public if they are to understand fully the issues at stake and which we are discussing here. That is not to diss the engagement the officials have had but we have a long way to go yet.

The public needs to know about the Real Map of Ireland and the sheer size of Ireland’s marine area. It is enormous. The size is multiples of that of the land of this country. Therefore, we have a huge resource. That means we have a large area in which to develop offshore wind energy generation. Consequently, I just do not accept the Minister of State’s suggestion that our having a buffer zone involving a required minimum distance from the coast precludes us from developing offshore wind energy generation. I have not heard a convincing response, if any, from the Government or Minister of State as to why, increasingly, the rest of Europe is pushing industrial offshore wind facilities much greater distances out. Judging from the Crown document to which I referred, the central scenario in respect of cost involved a distance of 60 km. In other words, the authors did not see any major difference between 60 km and closer in terms of the cost of development. There is no major cost implication to pushing the industrial wind farms a bit further out so as to have a win–win situation. I refer to harnessing our offshore wind and protecting our coastal environment.

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