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

I thank the Regional Group, including Deputy Naughten, for tabling this important motion on the critical subject of the development of our offshore wind energy resources. There is no doubt but that we need to develop our renewable energy resources quickly. A key part of that will be the development of our offshore wind capacity. Particularly given our huge maritime area and geographical location, we are well placed to play our part in moving away from fossil fuel energy, which we know is threatening the sustainability of life on our planet. There is an existential crisis so it is critical to address the problem. We are also aware that there is a major problem with the availability of energy generally and its cost, which we have seen ratchet up in a dramatic way. This is having a huge financial impact on those who can least afford it. There is a lot at stake, and there are many good points in this motion.

The simple fact that we have to discuss the detail of this motion is terribly important. There is a lot to discuss. Often we have been quite general in our approach to these issues. This is an attempt to get serious about the discussion. It is absolutely correct to call out the danger of a developer-led approach to developing our maritime area. I will talk about that a little more later but now want to make more positive points on the motion. It can facilitate more balanced development, including balanced regional development, to benefit other parts of the country and without concentrating everything in Dublin. That is a strong point that we need to take very seriously because we have unbalanced development in this country that needs to be addressed.

The issue of community gain or social benefit, as I would rather like to put it, from the development of our marine resources and our energy resources is also critically important. Well done to Deputy Naughten and the Regional Group for doing that.

However, a number of questions need to be answered and I do not have all the answers in this regard. These issues need to be discussed. Having spent a good deal of time dealing with the Maritime Area Planning Bill recently, to which Deputy Whitmore alluded and also tabled many amendments, I have major concerns about the developer-led approach. We know a developer-led approach to development onshore was not good and often led to the wrong types of developments in the wrong places, was not properly regulated and, at its worse, did extreme economic damage to this country and precipitated the greatest economic crash we ever saw. In that case, it did not produce cheaper housing, which became more expensive. It did environmental damage and so on.

To address onshore wind energy, what we do not need is a repetition of what happened at the Derrybrien wind farm. If we do not do proper environmental impact assessment in trying to meet the imperative of developing renewable energy, we can cut off our nose to spite our face. Coillte gave over a mountain, cut down the forest for the building of wind energy and a mountain collapsed because nobody had done the proper assessment. We are still paying heavy fines for it. There was also the recent case in Donegal and we still do not know what full cost impact that could have, either environmentally or financially.

I find it deeply concerning that Wind Energy Ireland, an association that has been mentioned a number of times today and, indeed, some of its arguments have been used, is arguing, in its documents on the development of offshore renewable resources, explicitly against a plan-led approach and explicitly for a developer-led approach. Why would it not do that given that it is a commercial corporate interest? It is interested in making money. We should not assume just because it is building wind turbines that somehow it has a more benign attitude towards the potential impact of what it does on the environment when money is the imperative. I am deeply concerned it is explicitly arguing for that approach. We must not bend to that approach.

I am particularly worried, given our previous record of failing to comply with environmental directives for onshore development, that we have only just over 2% of our marine area designated for marine protection, while Germany has 45%, France has 45% and most countries in Europe have a far higher percentage designated than us, and EU directives explicitly require us to have that network of marine protected areas and to take an ecosystem approach. Let us be clear, the protection of biodiversity and addressing the biodiversity crisis cannot be the poor relation of addressing the climate crisis because the biggest carbon sink, bar none, is the marine. We cannot afford to destroy the marine supposedly in the name of addressing the climate crisis because we will sabotage our efforts to address the climate crisis and potentially do damage to the marine. That cannot be allowed to happen.

Again, I do not know all the answers but we need to discuss in detail the question of the viability of further offshore floating wind - fair play to the proposers for referring to this in the motion - where potentially there can be less impact on communities but we get all the benefits and even slightly increased costs can be counteracted by the fact there is greater availability of wind further out at sea. Floating offshore wind has been developed in Scotland, Japan, Maine in the United States, Portugal and so on. I have heard officials say it will be a few years before we can do that here but I do not accept that and I want to know more about it. I do not like the fact that the major sites earmarked for development, potentially bypassing the need for protecting marine areas, the so-called relevant projects, are selected by the developers without having the proper environmental screening and marine protection that we are required to have.

I commend the motion but it must be the beginning of a much more in-depth, detailed conversation about how we balance the imperative to develop our offshore renewable energy while protecting our precious marine resources.

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